migrations

Pier 21 Museum of Immigration, Halifax.

Over the past several years, I’ve watched in both trepidation and then disgust as the political rhetoric around immigration has shifted and changed in ugly ways.

Maybe I’m attuned to it because I’m an immigrant myself. And maybe also because I’m brown, far too frequently targeted for ‘random’ additional security screening, and in the territory of immigrants that many on the right will never see as Canadian anyway.

And maybe that’s also why I find myself visiting Pier 21, the Canadian Museum of Immigration, on a regular basis.

I hadn’t expected my first visit to Pier 21, way back in 2017, to be as emotional as it was. And yet, as I stood there in the entry hall, looking at a glass case filled with suitcases and trunks, and then, around the corner, at a wall of luggage tags filled with stories, I found myself overwhelmed, and quite close to tears. I still feel that overwhelm when I read the story tags. Even today.

Suitcases and trunks at Pier 21.

so many stories shared by museum visitors.

I came to Canada as a child, travelling up from Venezuela (where we were also immigrants, and before that from England, where my parents occupied that nebulous “international student and spouse” pseudo-immigrant zone). In some ways, immigration felt ‘natural’ to me: immigration was a story I knew well, a path I’d taken more than once.

But until a couple of years before my first visit to Pier 21, I don’t know that I’d ever really thought about the process of immigration and its impact on my life: meeting new people, learning a new language, starting school in that new language, trying to figure out the mysterious but seemingly so well understood social conventions, feeling the air, the wind, the cold…

People have migrated for centuries, millennia even. And they’ve done so for a whole host of reasons: because they were forced to, because they were looking for a better life, because they hoped for different futures, because there was a job (and another and another), because there was nothing for them in the place (or places) they used to call home, because they were free spirits.

Sometimes it was a combination of all those things.

Underpinning decisions to migrate are a whole host of emotions: excitement, fear, grief, hope, anxiety, wonder, delight, anger, loss. It’s all there, churning away. And sometimes, those emotions can swirl around for years. Sometimes, they transcend generations.

Canada’s immigration policy – like that of many western countries – has been racist, classist, and ableist. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 made immigration virtually impossible for Chinese citizens. There were also restrictions on South Asian immigration (we might recall the case of the Komagata Maru) and, after WWI, on Communists, Mennonites, and Doukhobors, among others. Others – like Black Americans –  while not officially barred by law, nevertheless encountered significant racist barriers to immigration. (It’s worth noting here that because of racist immigration policies, the vast majority of those who arrived in Canada via Pier 21 where white Europeans).

Hints of these exclusionary practices remain: until about five years ago, some were denied permanent residency due to disability (see also here and here). Others were denied residency because their marriages were deemed to be in “bad faith,” relationships merely of convenience: in 2023, a woman from India was granted residency and the right to join her husband – after five failed applications and fully 24 years after they were married.

Hints of racist policies are embedded in social and cultural understandings, too: many immigrants of colour experience significant racism once they arrive because they are not seen as “true” (read: white) Canadians.

Things are even more challenging for those who come to Canada as refugees. And what if they enter the country in irregular (note: not illegal) ways?

And then there’s the whole framework of immigration itself, which has been premised on nationalist needs to populate so-called ‘empty’ lands? What have Canada’s immigration policies meant for Indigenous people, who have called this place home for thousands and thousands of years?

Migration is a complicated, messy business. It’s also a political one. The current rhetoric is not just dangerous, it is deadly.

With deepest thanks to all those who have shared - and continue to share - their migration stories.