Laura Madokoro

‘Slotting’ Chinese Families and Refugees, 1947–1967

This article explores the changing policy and legal frameworks governing migration from China to Canada from 1949 to 1967. The transition period between exclusion and universal access was characterized by slow and contested change, as the Canadian state persistently resisted pressure from community actors and religious groups to facilitate the entry of Chinese migrants, concerned as it was with the domestic stability of the nation. By exploring the intersection of the campaign to expand family sponsorship rights for Chinese Canadians, led by the Chinese Benevolent Association in Vancouver, and church interest in refugee resettlement from Hong Kong in the 1960s, this article demonstrates the critical role that civil society actors played in effecting change in the face of entrenched suspicion about immigration from China and growing state intervention in all aspects of Canadian family life in the postwar period. The debates that took place over expanded family migration from China were rooted in a fundamental conflict between family reunification as a basic human right and the state’s desire to control the shape and character of the Canadian nation and suggest that the liberalization of Canada’s immigration system in the postwar period was far from certain. Cet article analyse l’évolution des politiques et du cadre juridique qui ont régi les migrations entre la Chine et le Canada de 1949 à 1967. La période de transition entre l’exclusion et l’accès universel en fut une de changements lents et contestés, alors que l’État canadien, soucieux de stabilité sur le plan intérieur, a continuellement résisté aux pressions d’acteurs de la communauté et de groupes religieux pour favoriser l’entrée de migrants chinois. Explorant l’intersection de la campagne menée par la Chinese Benevolent Association de Vancouver pour étendre aux Canadiens chinois le droit au parrainage de la famille, d’une part, et, de l’autre, l’intérêtdel’Église envers les réfugiés de Hong Kong dans les années 1960, cet article confirme le rôle critique qu’ont joué les acteurs de la société civile pour amener des changements devant la méfiance bien enracinée envers l’immigration chinoise et de l’intervention toujours plus grande de l’État dans tous les aspects de la vie des familles canadiennes au lendemain de la guerre. Les débats d’alors au sujet d’une plus grande migration familiale en provenance de Chine enracinent dans un conflit entre le droit fondamental à la réunion des familles et le désir de l’État de contrôler le visage et le caractère de la nation canadienne. Ces débats suggèrent que la libéralisation du système canadien d’immigration dans l’aprèsguerre n’alla pas de soi.

Questioning the Dynamics and Language of Forced Migration in Asia: The experiences of ethnic Chinese refugees

To what extent are different parts of the world exceptional when it comes to the history of forced migration and refugee experiences? For instance, is forced migration in Asia distinct from developments elsewhere? Or is forced migration in Asia part of wider processes of displacement and emplacement so characteristic of the modern world? Over the past few decades, the fields of refugee and forced migration studies have ballooned. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, political science, geography, and history have sought to understand the nature of population displacements in the modern world. Much of the early scholarship in this field focused on Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. Scholars have also sought to understand the nature of protracted refugee situations in Africa. 1 More recently, scholars have investigated forced migration within globalized and transnational frameworks. 2 Yet no sooner had scholars started to think of displacement in these terms than critics began to contend that the unique, and localized, dimensions of displaced populations, including refugees, forced migrants, and internally displaced people, were being ignored. Questions about what is gained and what is lost in approaching the study of modern refugee populations from various vantage points now frame much of the work in the fields of refugee and forced migration studies. 3

Women at risk: globalization, gendered fear and the Canadian state

ABSTRACT This article considers the challenge of globalization in the context of evolving refugee populations, particularly in terms of gendered movements dynamics, from the 1970s to the present. Specifically, the article considers the history of the Women at Risk (AWR) Refugee Program that was initiated as a pilot project in 1987 and continues to operate three decades later. Through an examination of policy correspondence, reports from the field, eyewitness accounts and oral history interviews, the article traces the tensions between the federal government’s international commitments to refugee protection and the manner in which protection and assistance was understood by civil society actors. Building on a close reading of the early years of the AWR program, the article suggests that the experience of women refugees in particular highlights the tensions between protection and resettlement imperatives, which continue to animate questions of refugee protection and assistance in the present day.

Transactions and Trajectories: The Social Life of Chinese Migrant Photographs

Abstract Beginning in the 1880s, the New Zealand Collector of Customs required Chinese migrants temporarily departing the country to submit an identifying photograph to its custody and control. Migrants carried a duplicate copy with them to China and would present themselves, and their copy of the photograph, upon their return to New Zealand to regain entry and avoid paying a punitive poll tax more than once. As a result of these regulatory processes, the migrants, the New Zealand state and the photographs – as material objects – became enmeshed in a web of transactions. This article considers the transactions that shaped the material trajectories of the photographs by exploring four phases of their social life – from their creation in professional photography studios to their preservation and online dissemination by Archives New Zealand. In doing so, the aim is to explore the tensions between a photograph’s internal referents and its capacity to function as an index of transactions. Doing so provides a means to interrogate the power dynamics that underlay the operation of New Zealand’s exclusionary immigration legislation in the late nineteenth century, and which now animate the presentation of Chinese migration history to the general public via on-line exhibits at Archives New Zealand.

Family reunification as international history: Rethinking Sino-Canadian relations after 1970

Building on the emerging scholarship that treats the history of global migration as a crucial aspect of international history, this article examines the little known 1973 family reunification agreement between Canada and the People’s Republic of China. The article contends that, despite its limitations, the agreement was an important milestone in the history of Sino-Canadian relations. Through a detailed micro-history, the article reveals the shifting political currents that led to the agreement’s successful negotiation, highlighting how, by the early 1970s, Canada and other Western nations were embracing the notion of family reunification as an important human rights issue in the ongoing contests of the global Cold War.