Invisible Immigrants

Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, the story of the English has been all but untold. In Invisible Immigrants, Barber and Watson document the experiences of English-born immigrants who chose to come to Canada during England’s last major wave of emigration between the 1940s and the 1970s. Engaging life story oral histories reveal the aspirations, adventures, occasional naïveté, and challenges of these hidden immigrants. Postwar English immigrants believed they were moving to a familiar British country. Instead, like other immigrants, they found they had to deal with separation from home and family while adapting to a new country, a new landscape, and a new culture. Although English immigrants did not appear visibly different from their new neighbours, as soon as they spoke, they were immediately identified as “foreign.” Barber and Watson reveal the personal nature of the migration experience and how socio-economic structures, gender expectations, and marital status shaped possibilities and responses. In postwar North America dramatic changes in both technology and the formation of national identities influenced their new lives and helped shape their memories. Their stories contribute to our understanding of postwar immigration and fill a significant gap in the history of English migration to Canada.

Since 1776, more than 100,000 Swedish-speaking immigrants have arrived in Canada from Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Ukraine, and the United States. Elinor Barr’s Swedes in Canada is the definitive history of that immigrant experience. Active in almost every aspect of Canadian life, Swedish individuals and companies are responsible for the CN Tower, ships on the Great Lakes, and log buildings in Riding Mountain National Park. They have built railways and grain elevators all across the country, as well as churches and old folks’ homes in their communities. At the national level, the introduction of cross-country skiing and the success of ParticipACTION can be attributed to Swedes. Despite this long list of accomplishments, Swedish ethnic consciousness in Canada has often been very low. Using extensive archival and demographic research, Barr explores both the impressive Swedish legacy in Canada and the reasons for their invisibility as an immigrant community.

Contains letters from emigrant workers as well as background and analysis of their value as sources.

Pamphlet reporting on a statistical survey of immigration into the UK of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish migrant workers and their families - includes geographic distribution, employment patterns by occupation and industry, social class, migration mechanisms, etc. References and statistical tables.

"Until now, these migrations have been overlooked as scholars have highlighted instead the parallel migrations of former "colonized" peoples. This multidisciplinary volume presents essays by prominent sociologists, historians, and anthropologists on their research with the "invisible" migrant communities. Their work explores the experiences of colonists returning to France, Portugal and the Netherlands, the ways national and colonial ideologies of race and citizenship have assisted in or impeded their assimilation and the roles history and memory have played in this process, and the ways these migrations reflect the return of the "colonial" to Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

Becoming Canadian reveals how Michiel Horn, a Dutch immigrant in Canada in the 1950's, adjusted to the process of cultural assimilation. Horn tries to make sense of the immigrant impulse to integrate socially while maintaining a respect for heritage.