Flexing its Humanitarian Arm: The Memory of the St. Louis, Canada’s Jews, and Postwar Refugee Policy

• In Event: Between Prejudice and Humanitarianism in the Post-Nazi Racial State World

Abstract

On May 8, 1945, the Second World War officially ended on the European stage. Amidst the celebratory scenes, the gravity of destruction became clear. Some six million Jews were dead. Discriminatory Canadian immigration policy had created near impenetrable gates for Jewish asylum seekers during the Nazi era. It would take significant international pressure and a post-war change in leadership before the Canadian government re-evaluated its policy shortcomings and permitted the influx of some 35,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Some three decades later, in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, another major humanitarian crisis shook the world: tens of thousands of refugees, known as “boat people”, from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were literally stranded at sea. And yet, despite a pronounced history of anti-Asian prejudice and legislation in Canada, including the 1914 Komagata Maru incident and the Chinese “head tax”, the outcome for these asylum seekers would differ greatly.

Drawing from Canada’s past immigration history, Minister of Employment and Immigration Ronald Atkey declared that he was unwilling to be a part of “another ST. LOUIS.” A group of activists built a grassroots campaign pressuring the government to overthrow its racist past and flex its humanitarian arm. The confluence of these factors contributed to the resettlement of more than 50,000 Indochinese refugees over the span of eighteen months in 1979 and 1980. Another 5,000 had already been admitted in an earlier wave in 1975-76.

This paper illuminates the evolution of Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and public opinion towards refugees. Beginning with the ill-fated voyage of the ST. LOUIS in 1939 and continuing through the sponsorship and resettlement of more than 40,000 Syrian refugees, many brought to Canada under the auspice of synagogues and Jewish groups, this research addresses complex issues, including lessons were gleaned from Canada’s failure to aid the Jewish refugees of Nazism and how did the subsequent absorption of 35,000 Holocaust survivors influenced policy changes and perceptions of asylum seekers.

Author

• Adara Goldberg, Kean University