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From the 1870s until the Great Depression, immigration was often the question of the hour in Canada. Politicians, the media, and an array of interest groups viewed it as essential to nation building, developing the economy, and shaping Canada’s social and cultural character. One of the groups most determined to influence public debate and government policy on the issue was organized labour, and unionists were often relentless critics of immigrant recruitment. Guarding the Gates is the first detailed study of Canadian labour leaders’ approach to immigration, a key battleground in struggles between different political factions within the labour movement. --Publisher's description
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The article reviews the book, "American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years," by John Barnard.
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Canadian labour's agitation against Asian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Many historians have highlighted labour's concerns about Asian competition in the labour market, while others have explored the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism in most segments of Canadian, and especially British Columbian, society. But these factors – while important – do not sufficiently explain labour's antipathy to Asians. They particularly fail to account for the unity against Asian immigration between unionists in different regions, the influence of campaigns for exclusion in other countries, and the class content of labour's anti-Asian rhetoric. Another under-explored issue is whether unionists approached Asians in the same way as other immigrants, minorities, and oppressed groups. Drawing on the growing literature on racialization, and focusing primarily on the 1880s, when labour's views on Asian immigration became well established, this article shows how Asians were set apart from any groups with whom labour might have sympathy or common cause. Asians were associated with oppressive forces, particularly of the emerging industrial capitalist system. This association can be seen in many of labour's stereotypes of Asians as industrial slaves, ruthless competitors in the economy, and threats to white women. These stereotypes also set Asians up as polar opposites to the basic class, race, and gender identity that labour leaders sought to foster.
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This paper explores the approach of Canada's largest labour central, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC), to immigration from 1933 to 1939. This was a unique period in Canada's immigration history, as in 1930 the government responded to the onset of the Great Depression by closing the gates to almost all immigration for the first time since Confederation, and by 1933 there was no doubt that the gates would remain closed for some time. Despite this dramatic change, Canadian labour leaders stood by their longstanding views on immigration through to the end of the 1930s. Although the level of concern about immigration predictably declined, TLC leaders generally gained confidence that their established views had widespread support. This confidence encouraged unionists to pose as protectors of immigrants against hardship in Canada. It also assured them that they did not have to devote as much energy as in earlier periods to agitating for the deportation of some immigrants, or to their longtime favourite cause, restricting immigration from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. Altogether, changes in the economy and immigration rates did not necessarily entail changes in labour's attitudes. A number of other factors, including ideological trends within the movement, prevailing attitudes towards race and gender, and the efforts of groups advocating immigration served to entrench labour's views even more deeply in the 1930s.
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