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Graphical element Home > Exploration and Settlement > Moving Here, Staying Here Français
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Banner: Moving Here, Staying Here. The Canadian Immigrant Experience
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The Documentary TrailGraphical ElementTraces of the PastGraphical ElementFind an Immigrant
Introduction
Free From Local Prejudice
A National Open-Door Policy
Filling the Promised Land
A Preferred Policy
A Depressing Period
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The Undesirables

by Ellen Scheinberg, historian

Most new immigrants envisioned their new lives in Canada being full of opportunities. In the absence of any safety net, however, many were extremely vulnerable to deportation if they became ill or were charged with a crime.

For some of the unemployed and miserable, deportation came as a welcome relief, as it provided a free ticket back to their homelands. For the majority of immigrants, however, it was an assault on their efforts to establish new lives in Canada. Some had found jobs, purchased property and made new friends before the government forced them to give up all they had accomplished and acquired in this country. While most complied with the deportation order, a small number resisted and attempted to flee their place of residence and remain undetected by the authorities.

As far as the government was concerned, most deportation cases went smoothly. The general absence of lawyers from the process and the existence of bias within the judicial system meant that there few roadblocks preventing the government from deporting whomever it wished. Occasional difficulties arose, however, as when immigrants were wrongly deported or were transported to the wrong destination, sometimes with no one there to receive them.

Academics like Barbara Roberts have argued that deportation served as "the drain through which our immigrant refuse was directed," helping Canada "reduce the cost of maintaining some of its non-producing members by deferring those costs to the economies of the countries whence the immigrants had come." Although it is true that the government saved a great deal of money by deporting immigrants who were temporarily or permanently incapable of supporting themselves and their families, they were only able to do so with the implicit support of the Canadian public, who accepted the notion that only desirable immigrants -- hard-working and capable of assimilating and becoming good Canadian citizens -- deserved to stay in Canada.

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