JUST AS THE UNITED STATES government barred Chinese people from entering the United States and tried to prevent Wong Kim Ark from re-entering the country of his birth, exclusionary policies operated in Canada too. Perhaps most famously, the Canadian government worked assiduously to deport “back” to Japan thousands of citizens (born in Canada, it must be emphasized) of Japanese descent, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent war with Japan during World War II.
Although I am speaking of deportation here, because it is the most striking example of citizenship being revoked, it is important to note that regardless of whether they were deported or allowed to stay in Canada after the war, Japanese-Canadians lost the rights of citizenship during the war, because of their ancestry. It didn’t matter that many of them had been born in Canada or had become naturalized Canadians. In the time of war, Canadian authorities swept away their citizenship and focused on their race. Their ancestors came from Japan. This, supposedly, meant that they could not be trusted in a time of war with Japan. They didn’t just lose citizenship; under Canada’s War Measures Act, they were declared enemy aliens. The government confiscated their land and buildings, forced them out of coastal British Columbia, and placed more than twenty thousand of them in internment camps.
The internment and mistreatment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II (which was paralleled in the United States) demonstrates one way that national governments have pointed to blood as a means to justify the mistreatment of their citizens. Who is defined as a slave? Who is black or Aboriginal? Who is detained and searched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon? Who is respected in times of war? When crises erupt, blood trumps citizenship.
As Ann Gomer Sunahara notes in her book, The Politics of Racism, in 1944 the annual convention of the B.C. Canadian Legion and Vancouver’s mayor, J. W. Cornett, demanded that the “Japanese and their children be shipped to Japan after the war and never be allowed to return here.” Vancouver Centre MP and federal minister of pensions and health Ian Mackenzie applauded this statement. Despite the fact that both the Supreme Court of Canada and the Privy Council upheld the government’s right to deport Japanese-Canadians, Ottawa never managed to deport as many as some had hoped. Sunahara says that 3,965 Japanese-Canadians (51 percent of whom were Canadian-born) were shipped to Japan in 1946. Ostensibly, she says, they departed voluntarily, but in fact most left because the Canadian government had given them no choice.
As the internment and deportation of Japanese-Canadians suggests, citizenship in Canada too is a fickle thing, and in some cases has been revoked as a result of blood. In 1988, the Canadian government finally and formally apologized for interning and deporting Japanese-Canadians during the war. To make amends (mostly symbolic) to individuals wronged during the war, the government set up a modest compensation system for individuals and for the Japanese-Canadian community.
Two recent deportation cases show that the Canadian government is prepared to use whatever principles it can — citizenship as derived by blood or by place of birth — to rid itself of people it considers to be undesirable, even if those same people have a more real and tangible attachment to Canada than to any other country.
In 2012, Canada deported Jama Warsame and Saeed Jama to Somalia. Both were young men and long-time residents, but not citizens, of Canada. Both had been convicted of crimes: Warsame for robbery and drug crimes, and Jama for possessing crack cocaine for the purposes of trafficking. In a 2012 opinion piece for the Ottawa Citizen, Audrey Macklin noted: “Both men were born in Saudi Arabia to Somali refugees, arrived in Canada as children, have never set foot in Somalia, and can’t speak a Somali language. Saudi Arabia does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth on Saudi soil, so neither are Saudi citizens. They are Somali citizens because they were born to Somali citizens.”
The two men had grown up and were educated in Canada, resided in the country but never received Canadian citizenship. Having spent almost all of their lives here, was it right for the Canadian government to treat them and to deport them as Somali citizens? Were their ties to Canada — for better or for worse, and acknowledging the crimes perpetrated — less real than to a country where they have never lived, and don’t speak the language?
It is true that the cases of Warsame and Jama do not involve Canadians being stripped of legal citizenship (such as in the case of Japanese-Canadians deported after World War II), but they do show that the government was eager to deport people who had spent most of their lives in Canada and who had real family ties in the country. In both cases, the deportees had been brought to the country as children, but their parents had neglected to obtain Canadian citizenship for them. If Warsame and Jama had been Canadian-born citizens of long-time Canadian ancestors, Canada would be the only country that could claim them. Their undoing — after having been schooled in Canada, and after having learned in Canada how to become criminals — was to be seen as foreigners in the country.
In the case of Jama Warsame, even the UN Human Rights Committee declared that although he did not have Canadian nationality, Canada was still his country. As the committee noted, Warsame “arrived in Canada when he was four years old, his nuclear family lives in Canada, he has no ties to Somalia and has never lived there and has difficulties speaking the language . . . it is not disputed that (Warsame) has lived almost all his conscious life in Canada, that he received his entire education in Canada and that before coming to Canada he lived in Saudi Arabia and not in Somalia . . . (Warsame) has established that Canada was his own country . . . in the light of the strong ties connecting him to Canada, the presence of his family in Canada, the language he speaks, the duration of his stay in the country and the lack of any other ties than at best formal nationality with Somalia.”
It didn’t matter how forcefully the UN committee argued that deporting Warsame would break Canada’s own international commitments as a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It didn’t matter that in the case of Warsame, the UN committee argued that the man’s true country was broader than the mere concept of formal nationality. A person’s country, the committee argued, “embraces . . . an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien.” In the end, Canada deported Warsame and Jama anyway. They had the wrong blood and had been born in the wrong place.
Citizenship, in my view, should express your true connection to a place. Have you carved out a significant part of your life there? Been schooled there? Established serious family or economic connections? These are just some of the things that bind you to a place. Ascribing citizenship by place of birth, by blood, or by the process of naturalization have all been understandable attempts to shape the notion of who gets to belong. But immigration authorities have ample room to apply these principles in arbitrary or unfair ways in deciding who gets to walk through the door, and who gets to stay.
Just as we still tend to believe that the truest, most authentic family relationships are those based on blood ties, the deportation of Warsame and Jama shows that our nations continue to embrace an age-old notion that citizenship is defined most profoundly by blood. If you are born of the wrong ancestors — perhaps Japanese ancestors during World War II, or Saudi ancestors during North America’s post-9/11 war on terror — then you are at risk of being deported in times of war or terror, real or imagined.
I WOULD HAVE A FINE, FAT PIGGY BANK if I were to be paid a dollar for each and every time someone has either told me that I was “half black,” or “half black and half white,” or has spoken to me about another person having ancestry divided into neatly arithmetical parts, as in “one-quarter English, one-quarter Japanese, and half Tamil.”
The arithmetical quantification of race crops up in our daily language, because race is so deeply and subconsciously connected in our minds to blood. I meditated on this numbers approach t
o blood and race in my 2001 memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. When you step back and analyze the idea of blood as a metaphor for race, it seems patently ridiculous. Race is an artificial concept. It is an idea that we humans have imposed on one another. Just as one cannot have one knee of a supposed black race and another that is white, or twelve ribs that are Cherokee and another twelve that are Chinese, one can certainly not measure out one’s blood in racially distinct one-litre containers.
Race is widely considered to have no grounding in science, but there are various connections between race and scientific investigations. For example, scientists have determined certain DNA markers that tell us if two people are of the same family. Matching people of the same race appears to be one of many factors necessary for complex transfusions affecting material such as bone marrow. Certain diseases are more prevalent among certain racial groups. As well, popular ancestry tests these days can tell a person if he or she has distant ancestors from Africa, and if so, in what regions. However, the fact remains that there is no fundamental biological or genetic difference between people of different races. Genetic diversity is as multifarious and complex among people of the same race as it is across people of different races. Most social scientists these days agree that “race” is a fiction, a sort of social construct, a way that human beings have learned to organize themselves for the purposes of creating social hierarchies, and of justifying injustice. But the way that we have come to understand race consistently and insistently suggests variations in blood parts.
More than two hundred years ago, Western thinkers offered theories of race and biology, and of the supposed superiority of one race — generally called Caucasian — over the others. It would oversimplify matters to finger just one person, but the eighteenth-century German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach did not help matters by declaring that humans could be classified into five races: Caucasian (the white race), Mongolian (the yellow race), Ethiopian (the black race), Malay (the brown race), and American (the red race). In his treatise called On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach had this to say about coining the term Caucasian Race: “I have taken the name from Mount Caucasus because it produces the most beautiful race of men. I have not observed a single ugly face in that country in either sex. Nature has lavished upon the women beauties which are not seen elsewhere. I consider it impossible to look at them without loving them.”
Caucasian is a strange word indeed, and invokes a confusing geography. These days, people use Caucasian almost interchangeably with white, but the term comes from people in the Caucasus Mountains, located in Russia but also in Europe, northern India, the Middle East, and North Africa. All sorts of people in the world who don’t look white may indeed claim — and have indeed claimed — to be Caucasian in order to gain certain advantages, one of them being the right to become a naturalized American citizen.
Courts have looked dimly on such applications. Bhagat Singh Thind of India lost in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923, for example, when he asserted that being a high-caste Hindu born in Amritsar qualified him as a Caucasian and thus made him a white person eligible for American citizenship. Justice George Sutherland wrote the decision for the Supreme Court, saying: “We venture to think that the average well-informed white American would learn with some degree of astonishment that the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous elements.” Indeed.
Thinking on a similar level — that if you were from India, you couldn’t possibly be Caucasian and you could not be considered a true British subject — played out in Canada too. Consider the Komagata Maru steamship, which carried 376 British subjects (including two women and five children) from British India to the port of Vancouver. The ship arrived in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet on May 23, 1914. Some twenty of the passengers were eventually allowed to land in Canada, but the others were refused access, forced to remain on board the ship in deplorable conditions for two months, and eventually required to return to India.
At the time, Canada allowed British subjects to arrive in the country and become citizens, but because the migrants were mostly Sikhs from India, they were deemed not to be British. The B.C. Court of Appeal heard the case in 1914, ruling categorically against the would-be migrants. As James Walker notes in “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada, lawyer J. Edward Bird argued on behalf of the would-be immigrants from India. Bird said they could not be defined under the category of “Asiatic race” that the Canadian government had permitted itself to exclude from the country on the grounds of being aliens. (In 1910, the Canadian Immigration Act allowed for the exclusion of “immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuitable to the climate or requirements of Canada.”) Bird argued that the migrants were ethnologically Caucasians and racial cousins to the English. He told the judges that the migrants were indeed British subjects, that they should not be categorized as “aliens,” and that they deserved to be admitted to Canada, Walker notes.
The B.C. Supreme Court rejected the argument. Writing for the court, Justice Albert E. McPhillips said in the ruling: “It is plain that upon study of the question, the Hindu race, as well as the Asiatic race in general, are, in their conception of life and ideas of society, fundamentally different to the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races, and European races in general . . . the laws of this country are unsuited to them, and their ways and ideas may well be a menace to the well-being of the Canadian people.”
McPhillips went on to say that an influx of Hindus (as he called them) from India “might annihilate the nation and change its whole potential complexity, introduce Oriental ways as against European ways, eastern civilization for western civilization, and all the dire results that would naturally flow therefrom . . . their proper place of residence is within the confines of their respective countries in the continent of Asia, not in Canada, where their customs are not in vogue . . .”
Thus nearly all of the Indian migrants were forced to leave Vancouver Harbour on July 23, exactly two months after they had arrived. When the Komagata Maru arrived yet another two months later in Calcutta, police moved in to arrest a number of the men. A riot broke out. The police began shooting, and nineteen passengers were killed.
In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the House of Commons, and the British Columbia Legislature issued apologies for the treatment of the people on board the Komagata Maru. But the apologies, and the possibility to help nearly four hundred desperate migrants, came ninety years too late. Well into the twentieth century, many British subjects — be they from India, the Caribbean, or elsewhere — were not to be considered true British subjects and not considered eligible to come to Canada, because they were not white.
The U.S. Supreme Court in its decision about Bhagat Singh Thind, and the B.C. Court of Appeal in its ruling about the Indian migrants aboard the Komagata Maru, were influenced — as millions of others have been — by the writings of those who have preached a doctrine of racial distinctiveness and of racial superiority. The courts in both countries declared that if you were from India, you couldn’t be deemed Caucasian, British, or American. You could not simply leave your country and waltz into the United States or Canada. You were of the wrong blood.
Working for the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights in 1953–54, my mother, Donna Hill, crusaded against federal immigration policy. Canada, as a part of the British Empire, allowed British subjects to come to its lands. But it excluded Indians and blacks from the definition of British. Canadian immigration authorities kept a firm grip on who was allowed to enter the country.
In the early twentieth century, the Reverend Samuel Dwight Chown, a Methodist minister and Canada’s leading churchman, wrote: “The immigration question is the most vital one in Canada today, as it has to do with the purity of our national life-blood … It is foolish to dribble away the vitality of our own country in a vain endeavor to assimilate the world’s non-adjustable, profligate an
d indolent social parasites.”
Chown’s words reflected a wide swath of Canadian twentieth-century thinking, so my mother had her work cut out for her when she went to bat for a twenty-six-year-old Trinidadian man named Harry Narine-Singh, who found himself in a mess of trouble when he showed up in a Toronto army recruiting office in 1954, offering to enlist in the Canadian forces. Narine-Singh, who had been in Canada on a visitor status, was ordered deported after an immigration official by the name of C. Schreiber determined that he was an “East Indian” from “Trinidad, British West Indies.” The official later presented Narine-Singh with the explanation that he was not permitted to be in Canada because he was “Asian.”
In “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada, James Walker explains what happened next: “Harry protested that he was not an ‘Asian’: his family had been in Trinidad for five generations, and he had never even visited Asia; in fact he had never been anywhere except Trinidad and Toronto. Schreiber insisted the Narine-Singhs [Harry and his wife, Mearl] were Asian by ‘race.’”
My mother enlisted a lawyer to represent Narine-Singh and his case was fought through the courts, but a year later the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the deportation order. Narine-Singh and his wife were required to leave the country.
I asked my mother, a white American who moved with my black father from Washington, D.C., to Toronto in 1953 and soon became a passionate naturalized Canadian, what she remembered about Narine-Singh’s case. My mother was retired and eighty-five years old at the time of our interview in June 2013, but her mind was clear. She said she didn’t remember exactly what was said in court about Narine-Singh, because by the time of the ruling in 1955, she had left her job to have her first baby (my brother, Dan) and begun raising a family. “As a woman at that time, I was not able to have a family and keep my job,” she said. My mother had passed along the reins at the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights to Sid Blum.
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