Public consultations on immigration planning began Tuesday in Quebec. Some keys to understanding to set the table for discussions. Today, a historian looks back on other periods of great immigration to the country and on similar reactions.
The debates are old and the reactions are comparable. “It’s the same song, but not the same performer, nor the same orchestration,” insists historian Martin Pâquet. According to him, examining history allows us both to challenge the perception that there have never been as many immigrants as there are now and shows that fears mobilize the discourse, yesterday as today.
Canada has actually just surpassed the proportion of immigrants in its population at the start of the 20th century.e century, or 22% between 1911 and 1931.
In 1913, a total of 400,900 permanent residents arrived in Canada driven by the colonization of the Prairies, which displaced indigenous populations. We will have to wait more than a century, until 2021, for this record to be broken. And again: at the time, this contingent of immigrants represented more than 5% of Canada’s population of 7.6 million inhabitants. Keeping the proportions up to today, the equivalent would be an arrival of 2 million permanent residents in a single year!
Were these arrivals at the heart of the discussions? “Yes, immigration was debated at the beginning of the 20th centurye century,” replies Mr. Pâquet straight away. In this regard, he cites stirrings in public opinion in Quebec, embodied in particular by a series of articles by Georges Pelletier in the pages of the Duty as early as 1913. “He believes that there are too many immigrants and that the country will not be able to integrate them. […] The debate on reception capacity is an old debate, as you see,” summarizes the professor at Laval University.
The model is then that of “the assimilation of the foreign masses who invade the country”, as Mr. Pelletier writes, who also does not hesitate to rule on the “ethnic elements least likely to merge”. It rejects, among others, blacks, Asians, Jews and Sicilians. “There is a component of anti-Semitism, but also of generalized xenophobia,” relates Mr. Pâquet. We then have an organic perception of the city, understood in its political sense: “It is a body and foreign bodies cannot be assimilated. Especially when there is a difference in religion. »
The perfect immigrant for Pelletier would be the farmer, preferably from northern Europe, or even better, a French Canadian returning from exile in New England.
“At the beginning of the 20th centurye century in Quebec, it is the massive emigration of French Canadians to the United States which is in the background when we see the immigrants arriving,” continues the man who wrote an entire book on immigration issues, entitled Trace the margins of the city.
After the Second World War, these concerns were replaced by those of poverty and the proletarianization of the inhabitants; “this is what motivates the refusal of the foreigner,” says the historian. He notes today that it is rather fears about multiculturalism, language and housing which have taken this place in perceptions.
Without saying that politicians and the public reason as they did a hundred years ago, he still notes “the same attitudes, but with slightly different motives”.
Already passing migrants
Already at the beginning of the 20th centurye century, observers note that companies stimulate immigration, in particular to enrich themselves through the maritime transport of people. As in the current increase in the number of temporary immigrants, businesses therefore play a role in addition to that of the State.
And for Mr. Pâquet, it is more broadly population movements that characterize Canadian history, not just immigration. People come and others leave, sometimes settling down or returning later. Some have a multi-stop itinerary. The country is a place of transit rather than a final destination. The port of Quebec, for example, sees 4.4 million people between 1830 and 1937, in the “great upheaval” of peoples which began in the 19th centurye century.
“We must therefore take into account the intentions of migrants”, even today in the debate on temporary immigration, says the professor. It is the economy which above all directs migratory movements and which particularly motivates the choice of a language, he continues.
The constant in history is that “the fear of losing gains mobilizes political discourse”, with the risk that immigrants “easily become scapegoats”, he notes under his historian’s hat. As a citizen, he is concerned to see that speeches of fear of foreigners “tend to fragment the common good”.