Immigration History

In 1939, MS St. Louis carried Jewish German passengers fleeing the Nazi State to Cuba, where most were denied entry. The Canadian government under Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King chose not to admit the passengers in Canada, and they returned to Europe. The Canadian government’s exclusion of the passengers of MS St. Louis was rationalized based on sharp immigration restrictions during the Great Depression, but was rooted in the persistent climate of anti-Semitic exclusion. The event has been marked as such a dire failure that it has spurred more compassionate approaches to humanitarian admission since.

Manager of Research Monica MacDonald suggests that current debates on immigration are best informed by the historical contexts of immigration as well as the contemporary experiences of newcomers.

Between the 1870s and the 1960s, Canadian immigration authorities struggled with including or excluding immigrants belonging to conservative Christian religious groups based on perceptions of their desirability or undesirability. Canada’s effort to exclude these religious groups had two peaks: exclusionary efforts targeting Peace Churches during and after the First World War, and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration’s attempts to exclude “old order” and other conservative Christian denominations from Canada during the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1966, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) lobbied Canadian officials to accept a small number of Tibetan refugees for permanent resettlement. Initially, Canadian immigration officials disagreed over the resettlement of “self-described nomads.” Ultimately, Canadian officials resettled an experimental group of 228 Tibetan refugees in an effort to meet their international humanitarian obligations and to find a permanent solution to the plight of Tibetan refugees in northern India.

The migration of the New England Planters was the first significant migration to the Atlantic colonies in British North America. In the wake of the deportation of the Acadians in 1755, newly cultivated lands opened up in Nova Scotia, which needed to be populated. Roughly eight thousand men and women from New England came to settle in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, and in the Upper St. John River Valley of present-day New Brunswick, between 1759 and 1768. They left a legacy that can be found in the social, religious, and political life of Atlantic Canada.

Prior to 1850, fugitive slaves who escaped from the southern United States to the northern states were considered to be free. However, after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the northern states were no longer a safe haven. Escaped slaves could be captured by slavecatchers and returned to their owners.[1] This also meant that people who had escaped slavery by entering a free state years earlier could be returned to slavery.

It was a strange scene in Dawson City in the summer of 1897. Amidst the ramshackle wooden buildings, the muddy streets, and the grime covered prospectors, a large white circus tent covered the space of a city block. Inside were such luxuries as a portable bowling alley, a soda machine, two dozen pigeons, and fine silver and china. The owners of the tent were two wealthy American ladies, Mary Hitchcock and Edith Van Buren, who had come to Dawson City not to make their fortune, but to experience first-hand the excitement of the Klondike Gold Rush.

In the 1920s, immigrants from Czechoslovakia came to Canada in search of industrial work and available land for agriculture. Czechoslovakia’s diplomats in Canada promoted loyalty to Prague’s policies in the hopes that Slovaks and Czechs would unite into a “Czechoslovak” national community, and defend their homeland in the event of a war. During the Second World War, Czechoslovak diplomats lobbied Canadian officials for political recognition to legitimize their efforts to re-establish a postwar Czechoslovak Republic.

Victoria’s immigration facilities reflect the unique situation of the city in the early history of British Columbia, the surprising clout of public health officials, and intergovernmental conflict and cooperation. Victoria’s immigration facilities were eventually marginalized as Vancouver became a key port of entry in the 1920s. The facilities closed in 1958, and were demolished in 1978.