12 Immigration and White Supremacy: Past and Present
12 Immigration and White Supremacy: Past and Present
David Atkinson
Nativism continues to hide in plain sight in Canada. Martin Collacott’s June 2017 editorial on immigration in the Vancouver Sun resuscitates the same xenophobic ideas that animated white supremacists in British Columbia a century ago.1 While he conceals the source of his anxiety with terms like “visible minorities” and “newcomers,” his arguments represent a thinly veiled invocation of “Yellow Peril” rhetoric that was commonplace in the province during the early twentieth century. Like many contemporary critics of immigration in both North America and Europe, Collacott tries to disguise these antiquated racial ideas with euphemisms and expressions of socio-economic anxiety, but the fact remains; this is old wine in an old bottle.
Previous advocates of a “White Canada” regularly deployed the same arguments in their efforts to restrict Asian and other non-white immigration. For example, Collacott’s core contention that Canada will become the first country to “voluntarily allow its population to be largely replaced by people from elsewhere” was a constant refrain of the anti-Asian exclusion movement in British Columbia (and elsewhere) during the early twentieth century.
Prominent lawyer Charles Wilson K.C. expressed the same idea when testifying before the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration on behalf of the province in 1902. Decrying the supposed flood of Asian immigrants to B.C., Wilson implored the commissioners to
preserve one of the fairest portions of the earth’s surface for the Canadian people, and not allow it to be wrested from them, not by conquest, but simply by engulfing us in the rising tide of oriental immigration.
This widespread fear of impending white elimination was driven partly by apprehensions about the province’s geographical proximity to Asia, and partly by its isolation from other Canadian population centres. However, it was the irrational fear of an overwhelming Asian influx that truly chilled the blood of provincial exclusionists. As Vancouver City M.P. Herbert Henry Stevens warned during a public demonstration against the disembarkation of South Asian passengers from the Komagata Maru in June 1914, “at our doors there are 800 millions of Asiatics….the very least tremor from that source would unquestionably swamp us by weight of numbers.”
As Collacott’s editorial suggests, this fear of racial replacement is not simply a historical curiosity. Contemporary white supremacists are especially enamored of this notion of white “erasure”—or “white genocide.” Derived in part from the writings of convicted murderer David Lane, it has become one of the central messages of the so-called alt-right, which traffics in simplistic meme-driven distortions of history, ethnicity, and identity. Advocates of this concept variously denounce an international Jewish conspiracy or some blend of liberal social policies (abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, and miscege