Canada's growing immigration challenges: are we returning to dangerous policies of exclusion?
Yvonne Su is an associate professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York University and a visiting scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In 2023, Canada marked the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that explicitly banned nearly all Chinese immigrants for nearly a quarter century. Many see it as a black mark in Canadian history because it deliberately targeted and expelled the very Chinese labourers who had done the dangerous, back-breaking work of building the Canadian Pacific Railway, only to be cast aside once their labour was no longer needed.
The centenary was a moment of reflection. But since then, Canada has become more restrictive, not less. Rising immigration refusal rates, while not racially explicit, are carrying the pattern of exclusion forward.
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