PAST A TIPPING POINT, IMMIGRATION CREATES AN INFERIOR COUNTRY” (The Oriental Question–Part 1)
University of Victoria Professor Patricia Roy published her book, “The Oriental Question” in 2003. It was the second in a series of three books she wrote on early Chinese and Japanese immigration to Canada. Ms. Roy’s emphasis in her first book was on the Chinese. In the second, it is on the Japanese. In both, she accuses Canadians (who lived in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s) of discrimination.
Roy takes the title of her book (“The Oriental Question”) from an expression used by the United Church of Canada. Roy says the church was in conflict within itself. On one side was a clergy that advocated equality for Asians and, on the other, a laity who, in Roy’s characteristic prejudice against White Canadians says “acted like other white British Columbians”. To reconcile the two views, the United Church appointed a commission in 1927 to study what it termed the “Oriental Question”, that is, the general issue of Oriental immigration in a society governed by British-based law and traditions. She is one of many Canadian historians who have taken the side of Asian immigrants in order to curry favour with them. Like other historians, Roy is shameless in her willingness to play the race card. She is also shameless in her politically-correct bias against B.C. society of 100+ years ago.
In order to get a good sense of what was happening on the immigration issue, Roy says that she read a very large number of the 1914 to 1941 major daily newspapers in B.C. and most of the weeklies in relevant smaller centres.
This exclusively-British Columbia emphasis may cause some Canadians to think that Roy’s two books and this topic are merely regional matters and are therefore insignificant nationally. The fact is that most of the Asians who lived in Canada 100+ years ago lived in British Columbia. Consequently, Asian immigration was a major issue to the majority White population. In addition, the events that occurred on the Chinese and Japanese immigration issues 100+ years ago continue to have an enormous national impact on Canada even up to 2023. Why? Today’s immigration industry uses the alleged discrimination of the past to justify senseless high Asian immigration today. To the corrupt Asian immigration industry, current high immigration atones for alleged past discrimination by Whites against Asians.
The immigration industry demands for “diversity” over the past 40 years are really demands for a society that might have come into existence if Canada had been as weak 100+ years ago as it is today. If we are to even bother with current immigration industry allegations, the big question that remains is the following : Are the allegations about Canada’s past true?
In spite of the fact that Canada has become one of the most successful countries on the planet, Professor Roy argues that the allegations are true. She implies that the evidence she has uncovered demonstrates that the majority population in Canada was evil and wanted to preserve its dominant position. To achieve that, it took measures to prevent the Asian population from growing and even to help it decline. In her view, it was wrong for British Columbia and the rest of Canada to have defended itself by doing that.
To make her case, Professor Roy had to deal with two major arguments used by Canada’s majority population of 100+ years ago.
The first of these was a cultural one. The majority population said it did not want to be overwhelmed by the large populations of Japan and China which were, according to one politician 50 and 400 million respectively around 1919. In contrast, Canada’s population was about 8.5 million at that time. Those who favoured British”colonization” expressed it clearly by saying that they wanted to live in “British” Columbia, not “Chinese Columbia” or “Oriental Columbia”. Ms. Roy has no sympathy for such a feeling. She goes to the multiculturalist’s grab-bag of insults. She calls Canadians of 100+ years ago “xenophobic”, even “atavistic”. We might conclude that she also believes that all measures taken to preserve a society are “primitive” tendencies. National self-defence is wrong. To Roy, there is no such thing as a cultural limit to the number of outsiders that Canada (or any country?) can take. To her, the number (probably in the low thousands that Canada was taking in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was much too small.
To Roy’s credit, she does mention one particularly brilliant resolution, presented in the B.C. Legislature in 1928. That resolution presented a unique way of stopping a potential Asian immigration tsunami to Canada. In order to counter possible resentment from China and Japan, it “urged Ottawa to initiate negotiations with China and Japan to bring about exclusion and repatriation until ‘the proportion of Orientals in Canada to the Canadian population shall not exceed the proportion of Canadians in China and Japan respectively to the population of China and Japan’ .” To put the matter briefly, the resolution should read like this : “If China and Japan accepted only a few Canadians, then Canada would accept only a few Chinese and Japanese.”
This resolution implied to China and Japan that, like both of them, Canada had already developed an identity. That identity was good. It also meant that Canada did not need to ask other countries (particularly failures such as China and India for approval of Canada’s identity. To put the matter bluntly, if China, Japan or other countries like India did not like what Canada was saying, then China, Japan or India could go to hell. Canada’s founding groups (First Nations, French and English would have nothing to do with China and India. DISCUSSION OVER!!. It is clear that Professor Roy would have supported China’s efforts to rid itself of its 19th century White colonizers and to re-make China into “a predominantly yellow man’s country”. However, it’s also clear that that she would never support a similar defensive movement in Canada.
The second argument Roy deals with is an economic one. In her first book, Professor Roy does concede that the ill feeling against the Chinese and Japanese began as an economic issue. She does not say exactly when the situation changed, but that it became a “discrimination against Asians” issue. She even concedes that the economic issue continued to be contentious in the early decades of the 20th century. But, unlike with the cultural issue, Professor Roy does not try to explain the economic arguments of the majority population. She could have provided background to show that economic conditions in Japan, and particularly China, were much different from those in Canada. According to experts, Japanese workers in Canada could earn 10 times more in Canada than what they would earn in Japan. Chinese workers in Canada could earn 20 times as much as in China. Even worse figures applied to India.
Obviously, this wage difference was a strong incentive for an immigration industry to begin in Canada. For many years, particularly from the mid-1880’s, immigration profiteers in this industry were labour contractors who imported jobless Asians. Chinese labour contractors, the first to start this system here, were the equals of modern snakeheads. They paid for the transportation of Asians to Canada. They also paid Asian workers, whom they held on contract, below average wages. An employer could hire one or many. This resulted in undetermined numbers of Chinese being hired instead of Canadians and caused considerable resentment. She does not bother to look at early 20th Century Royal Commission investigations which showed that Chinese immigration contractors became very wealthy and that labour contracting was a significant factor in the labour market. Roy does quote a politician who refers to this practice, but she pays only token attention to the labour contractor issue. Because labour contractors were such a key to understanding the complaints made against the Chinese and Japanese, her refusal to deal with the labour contractor issue is a serious mistake.
In the first four parts of Roy’s “The Oriental Question”, Roy does uncover (unintentionally) a large amount of interesting other material.
In Chapter 1, for example, she points out that during WWI, the attitude of Canadian and British leaders was that it was best not to say much about the Asian immigration issue. Readers will be intrigued to discover that one of the reasons for this was that Japan, an ally of Canada, had sent part of its navy to patrol Canada’s west coast to protect Canada from German ships. As in all dealings with the Japanese, Canada was under pressure from Britain not to “offend” Japan. Commercial interests in Canada and the UK considered Japan an important trading partner. As a result, Canada and the UK dealt with Japan by using weighty diplomatic measures. In contrast,Canada and the UK issued only weak edicts to weak and corrupt China.
In Chapter 2, Roy deals with the argument that Asians and Whites were “inassimilable”, that is, they could not mix with one another. She reviews significant theories of the time and summarizes the conclusions of historians who had studied the conflict. Roy also quotes many British Columbians who respected individual Asians, but who were hostile to large numbers of them. She says that a number of religious leaders urged acceptance of Asians already here. However, those leaders were concerned about the threat of Buddhism, Confucianism and other Asian religions to White Christians. One made the fascinating comment that the history of North Africa (and its colonization by Muslims) might be repeated in North America. The Muslim issue is even more relevant today because The Muslim Brotherhood has brazenly threatened Canada, the U.S. and most Western countries with statements that its ultimate goal in going to the “WEST” is to destroy the “West”.
Roy says that children of different races usually mixed well in the B.C. school system and that White teachers treated Asian students well. She cites the work of Dr. Peter Sandiford of the University of Toronto whose studies had found that Japanese children scored higher on intelligence tests than did Chinese. Also that Japanese and Chinese did better than White children. She acknowledges that Sandiford’s study was faulty, but there is little doubt that she is obsessed with a bias that whites were afraid of Asian brain power. To emphasize that, she had written an earlier essay on this topic. In this book, she mentions the names and achievements of a few brilliant Japanese and Chinese students. But she does concede that the Chinese were not angels. She narrates incidents involving Chinese cultural practices such as gambling and drug use which even the Chinese acknowledged as significant deeply-rooted Chinese cultural flaws
In Chapter 3, Professor Roy discusses a number of measures that Canada took between 1919 and 1929 to halt Asian immigration. The exclusion of Chinese labourers in 1923 was the most dramatic. But there were others. To avoid potentially explosive job competition between returning WWI Canadian soldiers and new or returning Asian immigrants, Canada issued orders to trans-Pacific ships not to sell tickets to Chinese who did not have “return to Canada” certificates. These certificates entitled Chinese to return to Canada without re-paying the Head Tax. Regarding this contentious issue, Roy reveals that Canada actually refunded the Head Tax to 1200 Chinese and offered a similar refund to any Chinese who offered to return to China. Most Canadians probably know nothing about those re-payments. According to Historical Statistics of Canada, about 80,000 Chinese paid the Head Tax. It would have been quite informative to learn how many other Chinese had been given a refund. Does Roy have a reason for not providing details? Roy says that the exclusion of Chinese labourers caused stagnation in Chinese population growth in the 1920’s. However, the Japanese population increased greatly, partly as a result of fraud, and partly because of an inflow of Japanese ‘picture brides’ and children.
Let’s make this major point : in Roy’s analysis, she often selects material that supports her claims and ignores material that does not.
For instance, in her Introduction to this book, she says that in 1911, B.C. had around 400,000 residents, of whom almost 8% were Asian. She adds that by 1941, B.C. had 800,000 residents but the Asian population had fallen to 5%. Her purpose in citing these figures is to dismiss the White cultural argument in particular that the province was being “overwhelmed” by Asians.
However, she minimizes relevant facts. One is that Asians did not co-operate with the census takers, so the real Asian population was probably much higher than the figure that the census provides. A second is that she pays almost no attention to illegal Chinese immigration which a Royal Commission in 1911 had concluded was probably significant. A third is that a major reason for whatever decline occurred in the Asian population of B.C. was that a large number of the Chinese had moved from B.C. to other parts of Canada, not back to China as may be implied.
The last and most important reality is that there is such a thing as a “Tipping Point” in the identity of the population of any country. The “Tipping Point” is a point of no return and is probably a much lower figure than most people would think. Canada, with a visible minority population of around 17%, is now discovering this with considerable alarm.
Most Canadians can see that when a country allows immigration to become so high that it passes that point, the country becomes something fundamentally different. In fact, it becomes another country. And as a result of importing large amounts of unnecessary labour ( low-wage and other) the economic well-being of many people is undermined. In the chaotic vote-getting that follows, the society faces the danger of losing control of its cultural future.
“The oriental question” that our ancestors referred to is still a crucial question. It is a question about how many immigrants Canada takes, where they are from and how compatible they are with our traditions. And officialdom (led by Canada’s Prime Quisling Justin Trudeau ) is not asking these and other vitally-related questions. It is very clear that Trudeau has to pay significantly for this brazen betrayal of Canada.
It is also clear that Professor Roy refuses even to recognize the existence of a “Tipping Point”. And it is clear that high immigration supporters such as Canada’s multiculturalists and diversity promoters deny outright that such a point exists. Even if it did exist,these people would never admit that it would ever present any danger. Most Canadians have concluded that the multiculturalism with views such as these is outright idiocy.
With the benefit of hindsight, most Canadians can see that British Columbians of 100+ years ago not only recognized a tipping point, but also that they were correct and courageous in taking measures to stop the immigration situation from getting worse. Today, it is very clear that Canada would be much improved if its current population had the backbone of its early population. It is obvious that Asian immigration has transformed into Asian colonization and needs to be severely reduced. It is clear that Punjabi hacks like Dogmeat Singh and others of his ilk will continue their campaigns to increase Asian immigration. He and other Punjabis now boast that 500,000 Sikhs live in cities like Brampton. Several other cities have similar high Sikh populations. This is crucial for Canadians to realize because young Sikhs are disproportionately involved in criminal activities such as drug dealing and murder. Singh’s brazen advocacy of Punjabi immigration in Canada’s last federal election is a brazen betrayal of Canada. Income tax evaders in other ethnic groups are also a serious problem. At the very least, Dogmeat Singh and others should receive a strong boot from Canada’s majority population. That boot has to be delivered strongly if Canada is to survive. A significant number of Canada’s recent immigrants should never have been allowed to enter Canada.
