The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (review)

Synthesizing material from diverse sources, this rich and lengthy tome revises and updates a first edition that appeared in the 1990s. Its lead author labours for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and her co-author is a professor of law and economics. Prodigiously documented—the notes run for over 140 pages, the bibliography accounts for another 46—this well-written academic enterprise is nevertheless accessible to a lay reader. Driving the book are facts and stories drawn primarily from secondary sources. Court cases, policy papers, laws, regulations, extracts from parliamentary debates, and media commentary provide additional material. It seems that little has escaped the mesh of the authors’ research net. The book’s comprehensiveness and its historical arc—beginning in 1497 but with a post-Confederation focus—give it an encyclopaedic feel.

Those looking for graphs, photos, and tables will be disappointed. The sole figure offers data showing that contemporary Canadian public opinion, compared to opinion in seven other western states, is more positively disposed to consider immigrants beneficial to their country. It was not always so, as the book’s review of the well-known sorry treatment of various immigrant communities that came to Canada in earlier years—from the Irish to the Sikhs, Chinese, Japanese, Jews and others—reminds the reader. However, there is nothing new in this book about such communities, for the focus is not on the groups themselves but on the policy dimension of immigration and its evolution.

A desire to preserve Canada’s pre-existing ethnic complexion together with exclusionary racial policies informed immigration policy before the Second World War. In the 1930s, many municipalities had their indigent immigrants deported. A more liberal legal and economic approach to immigration, increasingly influenced by the labour movement and the rise of social movements, prevailed after the war. Between the mid-1970s and 1990s, at the same time that policy makers became more sensitive to the exhortations of ethnic and religious organizations, an influx of refugee claimants who carried no documents represented the main challenge to immigration policy. Groups of them dramatically came ashore on both coasts and highlighted the issue. One result was a revised Immigration Act in 2002 that narrowed applicants’ bases for claiming refugee status; policy retrenchment set in, with greater discretion exercised by the political executive, and security anxieties since 9/11 have only reinforced this trend.

The text’s chronological structure precludes systematic theorizing, but the book is not wholly uninformed by ideas. References in the introduction and conclusion to political theorists John Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Joseph Carens point to the tension between liberty and community, individualism and communitarianism. John Maynard Keynes’s conviction that ideas eventually win out over vested interests also gets a nod, as does public choice theory, the notion that material self-interest drives behaviour. These ideas, which frame the narrative, do not get much explicit airing, and this may lead some readers to see the book’s detail as eclectically selected. The authors conclude that no single theory can account for policy outcomes.

Three important interest groups—business, labour, and established ethnic communities—have influenced government policy, but they have done so in varying degrees in different eras. Corporations in the worlds of manufacturing, land development, railroading and shipping, were particularly influential at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a time when immigrants made up a higher percentage of the population than they do today and, for the decades between the two world wars, the responsible cabinet minister’s portfolio was known as Immigration and Colonization.

Sensitive to neo-institutionalist theories of political science, the authors describe how government structures have processed the demands of pressure groups and how the processes themselves have contributed to shaping policy outcomes. Personalities have also counted for much; current immigration minister Jason Kenney (although he does not appear in the book, which covers developments to...