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were killed.28 Hugh Johnston wrote of the “fear that Asian immigra-
tion might overwhelm white British Columbian society”29 and how
Sikhs already in Canada, “were well aware of Canadian hostility”
since they “heard it openly and rudely on the streets, and they saw it
in the immigration law that prevented their friends and relatives from
entering the country.”30
The second example is the head tax imposed on Chinese persons
immigrating to Canada.31 As Lily Cho explains, the head tax was a
policy response to allow some form of cheap labour to enter Canada,
while “pacifying fear and anxiety in Western Canada.”32 Cho writes
that the head tax permitted selective inclusion to allow for the eco-
nomic exploitation of Chinese persons while “appeasing an increas-
ingly angry BC population.”33
The research of both Johnston and Cho discuss the tension the
Sikh and Chinese figure raised: the need to import cheap labour while
addressing the fear in the white settler public of the Asian other.34 In
these and other examples, racialized migrants are constructed as for-
eign, contributing to the perception that they are disloyal and threaten
not only national security and public health but also cultural and
economic life in Western democracies.35 Labelling persons as foreign
permitted exploitative and abusive labour practices, while generating
the idea that migrant workers were disposable. It is the stickiness of
the label of foreignness that allows Asian Canadians to slip between
identities of the model minority and yellow peril, always pitting Asian
Canadians either against other racialized persons or against white
persons.
28. Ibid.
29. Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s
Colour Bar (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989) at 90. See
also Rita Dhamoon et al, Unmooring the Komagata Maru (Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press, 2020).
30. Ibid at 20.
31. Andrea Yu, “The Enduring Legacy of Canada’s Racist Head Tax on Chinese-
Canadians”, Maclean’s (1 March 2019), online: <www.macleans.ca/society/
the-enduring-legacy-of-canadas-racist-head-tax-on-chinese-canadians/>.
32. Lily Cho, “Rereading Chinese Head Tax Racism: Redress, Stereotype, and
Antiracist Critical Practice” (2002) 75 Essays on Can Writing 62 at 67.
33. Ibid.
34. Johnston, supra note 29; Cho, supra note 32.
35. Natsu Taylor Saito, “Model Minority, Yellow Peril: Functions of ‘Foreignness’ in
the Construction of Asian American Legal Identity” (1997) 4 Asian LJ 71.
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Title
- VULNERABLE
- Subtitle
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Authors
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Publisher
- Ottawa Press
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Size
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Pages
- 648
- Categories
- Coronavirus
- International