C H A P T E R F O U R
Population Movements and the Making of Canada- U.S. Not- So- Foreign Relations
Nora Faires
The relationship between Canada and the United States has prompted shift-ing and contradictory assessments that nonetheless invoke recurrshift-ing themes.
Especially common are those that emphasize concord and mutuality, invoking terms such as neighborliness, friendship, and kinship or partnership and alli-ance.1 Some stress the differences between these proximate nations, tracing a continental divide that separates the United States, a nation of “fire,” from Canada, one of “ice,” or, moving to the planetary scale, envisioning the United States as bellicose Mars and Canada as shining Venus.2 Especially for Cana-dian writers, asymmetry often provides the main motif: physically massive Canada dominated economically, politically, socially, and culturally by the smaller but wealthier, more populous, much more powerful, often oblivious United States. In an oft- quoted phrase, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau of Canada in 1969 likened the relationship to that of a “mouse in bed with an elephant.”3 Several recent analyses echo the theme, calling “life with Uncle [Sam]” increasingly “too close for comfort” for Canada.4 Yet no trope con-cerning these nations’ relationship is more familiar than that describing their boundary as the “longest undefended border in the world.” For at least a cen-tury diplomats, politicians, scholars, and journalists have hailed the bound-ary, 5,525 miles (8,891 kilometers) long, as a symbol of international coopera-tion.5
In 1941 Edgar W. McInnis, noted historian and veteran of the Canadian Ex-peditionary Force during the First World War, published his classic account of U.S.- Canadian relations, The Unguarded Frontier. His slightly reworked trope hints to a twenty- first- century audience of a nascent “borderlands” sensibility.6 Among other subjects McInnis explored how the unguarded border facilitated
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the movement of persons between Canada and the United States. Four years later, just months after the end of the Second World War, the American His-torical Association produced a pamphlet for the U.S. War Department titled Canada: Our Oldest Good Neighbor. Repeating the theme of the open boundary, the pamphlet declared that “for generation after generation, from Atlantic to Pacific, people have moved freely across the Canadian American border,” with the result that these nations developed “an international intimacy—there is no other way to describe it—that is quite unique.”7
This “unique” relationship and its connection to migration found ex-pression in another work of the period more familiar to those interested in population movements, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples.
Published in 1940 and written primarily by the pioneering historian of immi-gration Marcus Lee Hansen, the book was completed after Hansen’s death by John Bartlet Brebner.8 Hansen’s and Brebner’s sweeping narrative, though especially dated in its conceptual debt to Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the frontier and consequent neglect of urban and industrial development, nonetheless represents a landmark achievement, documenting a “movement of people to and fro across the Canadian- American boundary” from the seven-teenth century through the 1930s and connecting this movement to conditions in both countries.9 Notably, the book was part of the twenty- five- volume series
“The Relations of Canada and the United States,” commissioned by the Car-negie Endowment for International Peace as war was declared in Europe and Asia. Accordingly, from its conception The Mingling of the Canadian and Ameri-can Peoples sought to make the process of migration between these nations central to any consideration of their foreign relations.10 Hansen and Brebner stressed the tremendous duration, scope, and size of this movement, which included both French and English speakers (they had little to say about the many border crossers who spoke other languages); its often regional quality;
its “reciprocity”; and its construal as “one of those great natural phenomena . . . taken for granted in the lives of the two nations,” as James T. Shotwell, director of the series, proclaimed in the book’s introduction.11 Despite its ac-complishments, this work failed to spark sustained interest in the topic from either scholars of immigration or international relations.
Only since the 1990s has a substantial body of work rendered visible this multifaceted migration, rescuing it from what Bruno Ramirez termed “a histo-riographical desert.”12 The work of Ramirez and others has provided an over-arching analysis of the scope and scale of this migration during the last three centuries as well as a charting of the itineraries of individual migrants. Con-sequently we now know much more about the complexities and intricacies of this vast and diverse crisscrossing of the border.13 This scholarship has
dem-Not-So-Foreign Relations131 onstrated that this movement constituted a mass migration across a some-times quite “permeable border.”14 At the same time, these works have compli-cated substantially the image of unregulated population flows, demonstrating that both the United States and Canadian governments often acted to forestall the mingling of Métis and Native peoples and the cross- border movements of groups that each nation restricted, including Chinese and Japanese migrants;
and that in the early twentieth century Canada prohibited African Americans from immigrating to the prairies provinces, while in 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Immigration and Naturalization Service could deport a Nova Scotian man because of his sexuality.15 Such studies complement those documenting by far the best- known movement across the Canadian- U.S. bor-der: the Underground Railroad, which operated from the 1830s through the onset of the U.S. Civil War. The dramatic saga of self- emancipating African Americans fleeing a land of chattel slavery for one where the dread institution had become illegal has long been a focus of study. In recent years the subject has drawn great scholarly and tremendous popular attention, evidenced in books, articles, plays, curricula, museums, monuments, heritage tours, and internet sites. Together these efforts to uncover and memorialize the Under-ground Railroad have significantly advanced understanding of its operation and of those who rode its metaphorical rails across a border saturated with meaning.16
Despite the proliferation of this work, literature on the Underground Rail-road remains largely divorced from the historiography of other population movements across this boundary and from scholarly work on the U.S.- Canada borderlands. Moreover the study of the Underground Railroad and its partici-pants also remains largely disconnected from analyses of the relations be-tween the two countries, despite its having occurred at a key historical mo-ment offering rich possibilities for plumbing these relations. An exception is Karolyn Smardz Frost’s I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Under-ground Railroad, in which she explores a telling example. In 1833, after sub-stantial debate and legal wrangling, the government of what is now Ontario refused to return the fugitives Thornton and Lucie Blackburn to Michigan, from which they had fled after their identity as escapees from slavery became known. This ruling set precedent for decisions in similar cases until the Civil War and has done so more broadly up to the present, Canada continuing to prohibit extradition of those who would be penalized more severely in the United States.17 Smardz Frost concludes that the “Blackburn incident brought about a genuine crisis in relations between the United States and Canada.”18 With this insight, we harken back to the motif addressed by Hansen and Brebner, McInnis, and others and recently revisited by John J. Bukowczyk:
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the important interplay of borders, border crossing, and international rela-tions between Canada and the United States.19 In an age of intense public concern about border regulation in the North American continent and far- reaching changes in policies governing border crossing, these considerations seem especially timely. A focus on migration as central to international rela-tions does not ignore or decenter the state, not least because governments etch the boundary line between nations, enforce the traversal of the border, and establish policies for commercial and allied exchanges within the inter-national borderland. Instead, such an analysis joins work revitalizing the field of diplomatic history by examining the state by means of cultural approaches and considering those outside official channels. This chapter aims to nudge the topic of those crossing the border between Canada and the United States closer to the center of the history of these countries’ relations.
“Nations of Immigrants”
The heyday of the highly permeable border between the United States and Canada occurred from the end of the American Revolution (when what be-came Canada constituted a part of the British Empire) until the 1920s, an era during which those who fit the receiving country’s norms of race, class, and sexuality traversed this boundary with relative ease.20 Estimates of the num-ber of “Americans” (those from the United States) to Canada during these years place the figure at close to 250,000. In contrast, during the century follow-ing 1840 some 2.8 million Canadians settled in the United States, accountfollow-ing for between 6 and 11 percent of the overall U.S. foreign born. Thus though the migration between these two nations has been reciprocal, the net flow has greatly favored the United States, particularly between the late 1830s and the mid- 1890s and between 1915 and the 1920s. Because transatlantic traf-fic and hence European emigration declined steeply during the First World War, Canadians accounted for nearly a third of all immigrants to the United States in these years. At the end of the war a wave of anti- radical and restric-tionist sentiment swept across the United States, culminating in legislation that sharply curtailed immigration. Extending the already formidable bar-riers against most Asian emigrants, these laws broke with previous policies regarding European emigration. They limited the number of immigrants ad-mitted and established a “national origins” quota system that greatly favored those from the north and west of Europe while slamming the “golden door” to all but a comparative handful from the continent’s south and east, precisely those areas sending the great majority of immigrants. This system remained in effect until the 1960s.
Not-So-Foreign Relations133 Like other nations in the Western Hemisphere, Canada was exempted from these laws, the United States continuing its tradition of crafting distinctive policies for the two continents of the “New World” it regarded as its particular domain. Still, border restrictions stiffened for Canadians and other Western Hemisphere nationals during the 1920s and 1930s, especially as the Depres-sion prompted some U.S. officials to worry about potential jobseekers across the northern, and especially southern, border. In spite of tighter immigra-tion controls, tens of thousands of Canadians, with a wide array of economic backgrounds, continued along the well- trodden routes to the United States throughout the era of national quotas, with better rail and road connections facilitating travel.21
This chapter does not intend to trace the story of when and why this popu-lation flow came forcefully to the attention of one or both nations during the era of high border permeability, or to delineate the rhetoric and policies which ensued. More thorough analysis of the ebbs and flows of concern about migra-tion across the boundary by diverse constituencies in each country would con-tribute substantially to the neglected realm of binational relations during this period.22 Suffice it to say by example that Canada’s late- nineteenth- century
“National Policy,” aimed at shielding the Canadian economy from American imports and promoting the development of Canada’s infrastructure—an ini-tiative discussed prominently in the literature on Canada- U.S. foreign rela-tions—also sought to stem the flow of labor out of Canada.23 Tellingly, Liberal critics of the National Policy, championed by Prime Minister John A. Mac-donald, claimed that to show that the plan was working, Conservatives dras-tically undercounted the number of persons emigrating to the United States.
Consider the numerical gap at one border crossing: Canadian government statistics indicate that fewer than 7,000 persons left Sarnia, Ontario, for Port Huron, Michigan, in 1880 while U.S. figures show more than 94,000 arrivals.24
In some respects this century- old tussle between the Liberals and Conser-vatives provides an instance of the long- standing practice of Canadian poli-ticians and parties to distinguish themselves by virtue of their relations with and policies toward the United States, part of the larger pattern of constructing the Canadian nation in juxtaposition to the United States and defining “Cana-dianness” in opposition to “Americanness.” That the reverse does not hold true constitutes a crucial quality of the countries’ asymmetrical relationship. But an argument over the number of migrants from Canada to the United States also seems to expose a sore spot in the Canadian national psyche.
Both Canada and the United States, despite histories that encompass out-bursts of anti- foreign sentiment and nativist legislation, have claimed an iden-tity as a “nation of immigrants.” Canada’s embrace of this concept reaches
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back to the nineteenth century and has been expressed through a series of vig-orous programs to promote immigration, some quite successful. Yet Walter Nugent’s comparative analysis of the transatlantic migrations to the Western Hemisphere from 1870 to 1914 documents that Canada was distinctive among the four major receiving countries (along with Argentina, Brazil, and the United States) for being a nation both of large- scale immigration and emigra-tion.25 While millions of immigrants poured into Canada, many of them also streamed out, the “land of the second chance” serving as a funnel to the United States.26 That to a great extent the U.S. government and public, as well as schol-ars of migration, have neglected this movement might confirm the view that Canada and Canadians barely register in the American consciousness.27 Meanwhile Canada, like most sending countries, generally softpedals its history of population loss. There are exceptions. In the nineteenth century Canadian journalists and politicians episodically lamented or decried the flow of population to the United States, while several provincial governments in-stituted repatriation schemes.28 Beginning in the 1880s political and clerical leaders in Québec made fervent pleas to French Canadians not to leave their homeland, and in the 1920s voices in English Canada declared that emigration undermined national prosperity and progress.29 After the Second World War the discourse of the “brain drain” emerged to describe what some Canadian analysts deemed a national problem: the emigration of some of the nation’s best and brightest, or minimally those chockfull of Canadian investments in their human capital, to the United States. For Canadian nationalists these highly skilled emigrants carried with them a whiff of defection.
More commonly, the Canadian national story erases emigration. A recent essay collection declares that migration “has been the single most powerful force in shaping the traditions and history of Canada.”30 Yet the volume down-plays the crucial role of outmigration, with only two of fifteen essays examin-ing aspects of this pattern.31 In sharp contrast, emigration from the United States to Canada, so small in comparative numbers, receives substantial schol-arly and public attention in Canada and generally hails Canada’s role as a des-tination. In an essay that is a welcome addition to the small body of scholar-ship on tourism in the Canada- U.S. borderlands (a topic addressed below), Stephen T. Moore offers this concise statement: “Historically, Canada has always been a sanctuary of sorts for refugees fleeing some sort of ill- treatment in the United States.”32 His essay’s subjects are Americans who crossed the borderline to slake their thirst during Prohibition, visitors he deems “merely another example (albeit a less persecuted example) of Americans who found that by crossing the border they might avoid, or at least alleviate, the more un-comfortable aspects of being American.”33 For writers in this tradition the list
Not-So-Foreign Relations135 of these refugees includes “British loyalists,” “escaping slaves,” “Native Ameri-cans [fleeing] American troops” (by crossing what some Indians and Metís called the “Medicine Line”), and “Vietnam- era draft dodgers” (referred to as
“fugitives from injustice” in another essay in the same volume).34
While certainly no consensus exists among Canadian scholars or the Cana-dian public about which groups of Americans might round out such a roster, some contemporary analysts might add the uninsured seeking healthcare, patients hoping to purchase more affordable prescription drugs, gays and les-bians wishing to marry, advocates of gun control, and opponents of U.S. mili-tary interventions. For historians and scholars of migration, any compilation that includes groups as diverse as self- emancipating African Americans, tour-ists, and war resisters ignores crucial matters of context and chronology, elid-ing critical distinctions among those crosselid-ing the border and obscurelid-ing the issue of the border’s salience.
For Canadians, reciting a list of Americans who for whatever reason left the United States and moved northward serves an important ideological purpose.
In the nationalist narrative of which such recitations form a part, Canada is valorized as a welcoming land to any and all discontented with the nation to the south, the country that projects a self- image as a symbol of liberty and the ultimate destination of choice. Thus by understating its history of mas-sive emigration to the United States and valorizing instances of American movement to Canada (while simultaneously effacing its own history of chat-tel slavery and mistreatment of Native peoples), Canada not only becomes the
“Last Best West” (as the Prairie Provinces announced themselves at the end of the nineteenth century) but attains a self- conception of what might be called the “Last Best Nation” or a “Nation for Emigrants from the Nation of Immi-grants.”
This nationalist story constructing Canada as a haven for disenchanted Americans dovetails with Canada’s postwar self- narrative as less aggressive, more tolerant, more civil, and more civilized than the United States. This view found exquisite expression in the television commercial for Molson Canadian beer (“I am Canadian”) that swept Canada in 2000 and rapidly became an icon of popular culture. In the advertisement a character named “Joe” declares Canada “the best part of North America,” then proceeds to skewer American ignorance of Canada and of its symbols of national identity, from the “truly proud and noble beaver” to the letter zed.35 “Joe,” the Canadian Everyman, concludes that “Canadians believe in peacekeeping, not policing; diversity, not assimilation”—deft jabs at the stance of the United States toward the rest of the world and to the immigrants in its midst. While “Joe” and his sound bites clearly oversimplify reality, the commercial’s pithy phrases resonated
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with many listeners, including some Americans. Particularly in recent years, an array of U.S. domestic and foreign policies and practices have offered ample fodder for Canada’s project to portray itself as the “kindlier, gentler” occupant of North America—the humble, non- predatory, diligent beaver in contrast to the high- flying, sharp- taloned, opportunistic eagle.36 Belying this humility, however, Canadians apparently believe that a global audience shares much of their self- perception. As the Pew Global Attitudes Project of sixteen countries
with many listeners, including some Americans. Particularly in recent years, an array of U.S. domestic and foreign policies and practices have offered ample fodder for Canada’s project to portray itself as the “kindlier, gentler” occupant of North America—the humble, non- predatory, diligent beaver in contrast to the high- flying, sharp- taloned, opportunistic eagle.36 Belying this humility, however, Canadians apparently believe that a global audience shares much of their self- perception. As the Pew Global Attitudes Project of sixteen countries