In the fall of 1908, a ship bound for Canada sailed through choppy, stormy waters as it headed north from Central America. Standing on the deck was Nagar Singh, a representative of Vancouver’s South Asian community. He’d just witnessed firsthand the conditions of indentured South Asian migrants in the British Crown Colony of British Honduras. As he looked out at the ocean, Singh was approached by the Vancouver immigration agent who had accompanied him on the trip. The agent repeated what he had told Singh during their entire journey: that he needed to give a signed report recommending a voluntary relocation of the Indian community of Vancouver to British Honduras or the immigration office would turn them out by force. In the face of both the storm and the threats, though, Singh held his ground. The Indian community would not be relocating. He turned to the agent and told him “he had no right to threaten me, and his threats would carry no weight with me, and no one could turn my people out by force.”1
The history of immigration and border control in North America is often told through the lens of only the United States. In particular, this account usually starts with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a U.S. immigration policy implemented as a racist response to immigration from East Asia. Histories of racially-biased immigration laws in North America, however, often neglect Canada. Canada’s history with anti-Asian immigration restriction in many ways mirrors the United States. As migration across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of North America increased at the end of the nineteenth century, the then-Dominion of Canada joined the United States of America in crafting barriers against Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian migrants. What was more significant for Canada, however, was the step taken in 1908 to address a recent influx of migrants from India. Unlike the United States, Canada had to contend with the fact that Indians, upon arriving in the province of British Columbia, could and did claim a connection to white Canadian settlers as fellow subjects of the British Empire.2
The Canadian legislative response to the arrival of Indian migrants was the 1908 passage of the Continuous Journey Act. The law barred any immigrant from coming to Canada by any route other than a “continuous journey” from their “country of origin.”3 The law specifically targeted Indians, in a way that did not force the British Imperial government to intervene on their behalf.4 After all, migrants traveling from England would also need to abide by the Continuous Journey restriction—but they could actually make such a journey via steamship, something not possible from the Indian subcontinent in 1908.
The most infamous case involving the Continuous Journey Act was the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, in which a group of 300 Indian migrants attempted to challenge that Canadian law under British Imperial law. The migrants were unsuccessful, and after months trapped in Vancouver harbor were eventually forced to return to India. But immigration restrictionists in Canada did not stop at restricting migration at the border. In 1908, the same year as the Continuous Journey Act, immigration opponents also attempted to convince the South Asian community in Vancouver to emigrate to a more “suitable” British imperial colony—British Honduras.5
A photograph of the SS Komagata Maru, trapped in Vancouver Harbor in June of 1914. The passengers were not permitted to disembark the ship and were often forced to beg the Vancouver immigration authorities for food and water. Photo credit: The Vancouver Public Library
Deportation as an act of border enforcement and racial population control is unfortunately incredibly present in our current moment.6 Looking at the history of racially-biased immigration law in Canada, it is clear that deportation has always been coupled with border control as a tactic for maintaining a white status quo in North America.7
South Asian migrants had been relocating to the west coast of Canada for work since the late 1800s. By the time the Canadians thought to impose border control, there was already an Indian community of over three thousand people living in the area surrounding Vancouver. Most of these migrants were Punjabi Sikhs. Many were employed in the sawmill industry.8 While the Continuous Journey Act intended to eliminate—or at the very least, greatly decrease—any further Indian migration to the Canadian west coast, it did not address the existing Indian community in Vancouver. Although they were only around 3% of the city’s total population, the Indian community had started to put down cultural roots in the city. The community was in many ways thriving, with an active gurdwara, a place of worship for Sikhs, and a vibrant enough cultural scene that it often played host to various Indian intellectuals and teachers who travelled through Vancouver on their way to and from the United States.9 For immigration opponents whose goal was to remove the Indian presence from Vancouver altogether, border control was not enough. It needed additional tactics to permanently remove the Indian presence from Canada—relocation and deportation.
A photograph of Sikh sawmill workers outside Vancouver, c. 1900. Photo credit: The Vancouver Public Library
To increase deportations, the Vancouver immigration office tried to justify a plan to deport the Indian community by claiming that its members were always on the verge of unemployment. But workers in the lumber industry in particular were actually enjoying a high income. The Free Hindustan newspaper of Vancouver made a very pointed case in May of 1908 that Indians were migrating to Canada to escape poverty caused by the British administration of India.10 The Vancouver immigration office’s own records showed that, despite their expectations, migrants arriving in British Columbia before 1908 were not the “paupers” the immigration officers expected them to be.11 Nevertheless, that immigration office continued to craft its own policies on the assumption that Indian migrants were likely to become a public charge in Vancouver.12
When the immigration office’s deportation for unemployment scheme failed, it then planned to compel Vancouver’s Indian community to move to another part of the empire—specifically to a colony with no significant white settlement that would be threatened by a large and increasing Indian labor population. The immigration office suggested British Honduras, a colony in the Caribbean, as a more suitable home for the Indian laborers in British Columbia. But because of the tangled web of British imperial citizenship still nominally protecting the Indian community, the Vancouver office’s scheme had one large hurdle: the proposal also insisted that the Indian community of Vancouver would have to be convinced to make the move voluntarily. Canada’s need to tread lightly around the matter gave the Indian community of Vancouver enough power that their rejection of the move would have stopped any implementation of the plan in its tracks.
The Vancouver immigration office came up with a plan. They paid for a white immigration official, W.C. Hopkinson, to accompany two representatives of the Indian community on a fact-finding trip to British Honduras. The immigration office’s goal was to sell the community on relocation by convincing two men, Sham Singh and Nagar Singh, that they and their fellow workers would be better off in the Caribbean colony.13 But the immigration office was not prepared for the reality of conditions in British Honduras. And they misjudged the two representatives, whose diaries and reports on the trip tell a very stark tale of attempted manipulation and corruption.
Sham Singh’s diary stated boldly that “we know from [Indians working the plantations] that British Honduras is not a good country.”14 Both men indicated that the wages offered for potential work on plantations in British Honduras would be much lower than what they were making in British Columbia. Nagar Singh reported that one man warned the delegates that he was “living from hand to mouth” and could not find work. Even Hopkinson recorded the potential wages in British Honduras as much lower than those known to be available in British Columbia: eight dollars per month, even if written and presented as a livable wage, was a far cry from the three dollars a day they were making in Vancouver.15
But the incident on the trip that most damned the immigration office’s scheme was an interaction between Hopkinson and Nagar Singh. Singh claimed that Hopkinson had attempted to bribe him with three thousand dollars into making a favorable report about British Honduras to the Vancouver community. Singh not only recorded this in his trip diary, but also immediately informed other leaders in the Indian community about it upon his return.16 Once news of the bribe spread, any hope the Vancouver Immigration Office had of fulfilling the Imperial requirement that the community consent to the move was shattered. By late October in 1908, the India Office in London had received a telegram from Victoria informing the Office that Indians in British Columbia were “protesting against removal to British Honduras.”17 And in an unlikely tale of immigrant triumph, the Indian community of Vancouver remained. Their presence and support were crucial to the Komagata Maru case. Although it is memorable as a failure in the fight against immigration restriction, the Indian community in Vancouver’s participation in that fight helped it be as fraught and significant as it was.
The Komagata Maru memorial that sits today in Vancouver harbor. It was erected in 2012. Photo by the author.
The most important consequence of the attempted British Honduras relocation of 1908 was that it failed. Nagar Singh and Sham Singh exposed the lies of the Vancouver immigration office, and the community still had enough power to refuse the relocation and stay where they were. This was largely due to the trump card they carried—British Imperial citizenship. Although steeped in the British exploitation of the Indian subcontinent, the legal weight it carried in other British colonies, in this case at least, meant the Indian population of Vancouver was not forcibly removed from their work and homes. That the uncertain category of Imperial citizenship in this case tipped the scales in favor of immigrant rights highlights the many other cases in which the Imperial government abandoned Indians and other groups abroad when they ran into racial discrimination. And the Vancouver immigration office’s immediate attempt at deportation following the immigration restriction of the Continuous Journey Act shows something even more important—in the quest to bar certain immigrant groups, border control is merely the first step in a project whose end goal is the elimination of a community.
- A recounting of this encounter on Singh’s journey back to Canada is told in his diary and official report of the trip, held at the Library and Archives Canada. (LAC, RG25-200)
- Anyone interested in further reading on the idea of British Imperial citizenship might be interested in Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); and Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
- Government of Canada, Statutes of Canada. “An Act to Amend the Immigration Act, 1908.” Ottawa: SC 7-8 Edward VII, Chapter 33, Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
- Canada’s status as a Dominion within the British Empire meant the Canadian government was free to pass and create their own internal laws, but still deferred to the Colonial Office in London on matters of international affairs and inter-imperial disputes. Any law explicitly affecting both Canada and India, therefore, would be subject to the approval of the Colonial Office and the India Office.
- British Honduras was the colonial name for the country now known as Belize. “Suitable,” for the Canadian Ministry of the Interior, meant a British colony with a large population of South Asians, rather than a white settler colony. The euphemistic language of “suitability” masked a strong interest in racial segregation. (LAC, RG25-200)
- Aside from border control and deportations, immigration restrictionists would also attempt to strip immigrants of citizenship through denaturalization, as the US successfully did to South Asians in 1923. For a more in-depth historical look at this ruling, see the recent online series by the South Asian American Digital Archive. There are many people with very real concerns about the United States government using denaturalization to strip migrants of their citizenship. Dara Lind, “Denaturalization, explained: how Trump can strip immigrants of their citizenship” Vox, July 18, 2018.
- W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), ix.
- British Library (BL), IOR/L/PJ/6/864, file 1371
- BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/780, file 3330
- BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/888, file 3134
- BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/780, file 3330
- “Public Charge” as an anti-immigrant term has again entered North American discourse around immigration as of 2019. The Trump administration’s “public charge” rule seeks to bar immigrants who may one day rely on public benefit programs. This is a supposedly neutral term which is often employed in racists or xenophobic ways, which the public charge determination being made largely in relation to an immigrant’s country of origin. Nicole Narea, “Trump’s rule creating a wealth test for immigrants is now in effect” Vox, October 11, 2019. See also Rebecca Brenner Graham, “No Refuge.”
- BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/864, file 1371
- Library and Archives Canada, RG25-200
- BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/864, file 1371
- LAC, RG25-200
- BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/901, file 3917
