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SoSe 13: Canadian Immigration Policies in Global Perspective

Robert Julio Decker

Comments

Canadian immigration policies in the nineteenth and twentieth century were shaped by three factors: immigration to the United States, immigration policies in other dominions of the British Empire and domestic factors, especially the relation between the federal government and the provinces and territories. Thus, this seminar focuses on a global perspective on the history of Canadian immigration policies from the eighteenth to the twentieth-first century, contextualizing immigrant experiences with Canadian discussions about immigration. To analyze and interpret primary and secondary sources, the seminar will integrate theoretical writings about ethnicity and explore the history of racism which shaped immigration policies significantly. These approaches will help to understand how public discussions about immigration were transformed into a growingly elaborate system of immigration regulations. Finally, this course explores the creation of the concept of ethnicity, implying cultural instead of racial identities and analyzes how group identities were shaped by both immigrants and Canadians and how they affected immigrant experience and their incorporation into Canadian society. Students will be required to write an academic paper to successfully complete this seminar - thus, sessions on how to write a history paper will be included. List of Topics 1. Introduction/first session 2. Early experiences: settlers and colonists 3. The second wave: the Irish and territorial expansion 4. Clifford Sifton, the First Nations and land appropriation in the West 5. Nineteenth-century racial concepts, citizenship and immigration 6. Models for regulation I: Great Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa 7. Writing an academic paper 8. Chinese, Japanese and Indian experiences: limiting citizenship and the right to immigration by race 9. Anti-Asian immigration movements in South Africa, Australia, and on the Pacific coast 10. Making Canadians: social sciences and assimilation after the Great War 11. Confinements of race, class and gender: immigrants' experiences in literature and culture 12. Presentations: students' exposes for academic papers 13. Post-war reform: the redefinition of Canadian citizenship 1946/47 and visible minorities 14. A model for multiculturalism? Immigration regulation at the turn of the twentieth-first century Core Texts Primary: Students will be provided with a Primary Source course pack especially designed for this module Secondary: - Alison Games: Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. - Gary Gerstle: American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. - David R. Gutiérrez: Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. - John Higham: Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. - Matthew Jacobson: Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. - Lucy Salyer: Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. - Aristide R. Zolberg: A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, MA: Russel Sage Foundation of Harvard University Press, 2006. Module Objectives On completion of this module, students will: - Possess comprehensive knowledge of the history of immigration to Canada. - Be able to apply a range of approaches ranging from critical whiteness studies to legislative history to the history of immigration to Canada. - Be able to identify and engage with a range of historiographic arguments relating to immigration history and the history of race and ethnicity in Canada. - Be able to make elaborate arguments about the course of Canadian immigration policies in an academic paper. close