Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (review)

In some circles today, the millions of European immigrants who came to Canada after the Second World War, and their descendants, are regarded as model immigrants and model minorities. In comparative terms they constitute the success stories that new waves of visible minority immigrants are benchmarked against. A good part of the discussion about immigration and diversity today is laced with a sense of foreboding, in part because a large proportion of Canada's current intake is made up of visible minority immigrants. Put simply, some commentators suggest that today's visible minority immigrants may be bringing too much diversity to Canada, and if this diversity is not properly managed, the country could be heading for trouble. Canada's immigration history is full of ironies. One is that today's model immigrants and their descendants were in fact yesterday's problematic immigrants. Another is that the potential problems that new visible minority immigrants are construed to present Canada with today are not so different from the potential problems that previous waves of European immigrants were construed to present Canada with in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Franca Iacovetta's most recent book is an investigation of how Cold War anxieties and containment techniques shaped the lives of postwar European immigrants in Canada. The book is organized around the concept of gatekeepers – the middle-class individuals and organizations who patrolled the physical and symbolic borders of the country, as well as those who regulated contact with the expanding welfare state and wider Canadian society. The key gatekeepers examined by Iacovetta include reporters and magazine journalists, Department of Citizenship officials, social workers, family and child-care experts, front-line caseworkers, counsellors, and mental health experts. Various kinds of gatekeeper and immigrant and refugee interactions are examined in the book, resulting in a refreshing analysis of the agendas of various gatekeepers, how those agendas were shaped by the Cold War, bourgeois gender ideologies, and European immigrant lives, and how they shaped the experiences of European immigrants. Though seen as potentially valuable future citizens, postwar European immigrants were nonetheless regarded as damaged and potentially dangerous.

One of the best chapters in the book deals with 'culinary containment.' Immigrant eating habits, food preferences, and food-preparation techniques, Iacovetta argues, were no less political than ethnic organizations and the ethnic press. The chapter is a truly fascinating examination of interactions between Citizenship officials, food writers, professional dieticians, social workers and fashion writers, and the cultures of food associated with immigrant households. Gatekeeper efforts to regulate, control, and modify these cultures of food reflected a mix of democratic ideals and Cold War politics. At the same time, however, Iacovetta notes that foodways also became one of the early sites for the emergence of a sense of Canadian cultural pluralism; gatekeepers began to recognize that 'ethnic foods' could be appropriated for nation building.

This is a terrific book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in issues of immigration and immigrant settlement both in the past and the present, postwar gender relations, and the Cold War. There is one silence in the book, and it concerns what gatekeepers had to say about the more than one million British and American immigrants who came to Canada during the Cold War. Most of the cases and examples in the book deal with the concerns that gatekeepers had about eastern, southern, and northern European immigrants. British and American immigrants feature as the objects of gatekeeper concern in two or three cases and issues discussed in the book, but generally they seem to be absent from the discussion.

I cannot help but wonder whether the immigrants who came to Canada from Britain and the United States were simply not the general objects of gatekeeper concern, or whether they were also seen to have negative emotional and political baggage that they brought to the country, and whether they were also in need of social, political, and familial regulation.