‘Send them back’:
Donald Trump’s ugly tweet captured beliefs and sentiments that have deep roots—in Canada
The ignoble sentiment of Trump’s racist tweets has a long legislative history in Canada
By the time the 30th boat arrived on the shores of Grosse Isle, an island smaller than eight square kilometres, George Mellis Douglas knew the deaths were inevitable. Tragedy did not faze the doctor—you don’t spend a decade as the medical superintendent of a Victorian colony’s quarantine island without digging a few graves—but the tiny speck in the middle of Quebec’s St. Lawrence River was equipped with just 200 hospital beds. When the boats started landing, Douglas upped it to 250. But by May 20, 1847, the transatlantic fleet had off-loaded 12,519 Irish emigrants, all of them sick, poor, starved and hopeless. This was how the United Kingdom decided to combat the Great Famine of Ireland: cast off the poorest to British North America.
Grosse Isle was set up as a quarantine island, but the sheer volume of people rendered that purpose absurd. “I never contemplated the possibility of every vessel arriving with fever,” Douglas confided in a letter to London. Boats couldn’t unload for days at a time, effectively jailing thousands without food, water or medical attention. As months trudged along, 100,000 Irish immigrants arrived in British North America. More than 17,300 of them died, including 5,000 who remain buried in mass unmarked graves on Grosse Isle. Douglas himself survived a season of disease, only to lose his second wife years later and find himself racked by a massive mortgage on his Quebec home. He stabbed himself to death on the property in 1864.
The surviving Irish spread inland across the provinces, introducing British Canadians to the first mass influx of unwanted immigrants since they themselves arrived to the detriment of First Nations tribes before them. “The typhus fever and dysentery have reached even this remote place,” wrote Eleanor Dunlop, a Peterborough resident, in her book Our Forest Home. “Wherever those wretched immigrants came they brought with them sickness and death.”
The spectre of “dirty Irish” spreading disease would echo throughout decades of immigration law. A er Confederation bore the mostly autonomous Dominion of Canada, one of the earliest laws drafted was the Immigration Act of 1869, which contained a section on “Pauper Immigrants,” legalizing measures against allowing undesirables into the country. The Immigration Act warned of penalties against any “lunatic, idiotic, deaf and dumb, blind or infirm person, or any person above the age of sixty years, or any widow with a child or children, or any woman with a child or children without her husband.”
Three years later, the government amended the Immigration Act. Legal recourse against unwelcome newcomers was beefed up with something more actionable than just fines: they could now set foot on Canadian soil, but only temporarily, until the Canadian government could send them back “from whence they came.”
The government had officially legalized deportation. Not suitable for Canada? We don’t want you—go back to where you came from. It’s the law.
Fast-forward more than a century. U.S. President Donald Trump echoed those 19th-century nativist sentiments on July 14, critically tweeting at four Democratic congresswomen, “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world,” to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Never mind that three of the four attacked congresswomen were born in the United States—Trump defended the remarks the next day, boasting in a press conference that “many people agree with me.”
Whether or not the president realizes it, his words can only be described as bluntly, historically and categorically racist. Any variation on the phrase “go back home” carries centuries of xenophobic fears and hatred, and it is more than likely that the “many people” who agreed with him share such shameless views. Most prominent among them are “white nationalists,” more aptly called white supremacists, who believe North America ought to be a white-skinned ethnostate, ignorantly waving off centuries of Indigenous legacy and immigrant contributions.
“I think Canadians and indeed people around the world know what I think of those particular comments. That’s not how we do things in Canada.” Prime Minister Trudeau’s reaction affirmed the comfortable attitude held by many Canadians that this country is above such overt racism, that it has no place here.
But they’re wrong. Excluding unwanted immigrants is literally foundational to Canadian identity, while blatant xenophobia, through the decades, has been codified in law and policy at the expense of the Irish in 1847, the Chinese in 1885, the Sikhs in 1914, the Jews in 1939, the Japanese in the 1940s and the Haitians in 1973. Today, Canadians of colour continue the struggle. Maxime Bernier—who, a er losing the federal Conservative party leadership nomination, kick
started his own People’s Party of Canada, a grassroots amalgam of populist nativism and economic libertarianism—rails against what he has dubbed “extreme multiculturalism.” In late July, he vowed that, as prime minister, he would slash immigration levels by half, to as few as 100,000 per year, falsely claiming that Canadians subsidize 74 per cent of current immigrants.
Bernier will almost certainly not be prime minister, but to ignore his comments would be a mistake. According to a new Pollara study provided exclusively to Maclean’s, a full third of Canadians hold negative views toward at least one specific ethnic group in our country. This distaste is especially pronounced when it comes to newer immigrants: only four per cent of Canadians hold negative views against immigrants who landed 40 years ago, as opposed to 10 per cent who feel the same way toward anyone who arrived in the last 15 years. The same percentage of Canadians hold negative views toward refugees who arrived within the last three years.
Some might argue that 10 per cent isn’t a large number. But it’s growing. According to Statistics Canada, hate crimes against Muslims grew 253 per cent from 2012 to 2015, while police-reported hate crimes—only a fraction of the total, unreported number— reached a record-high 2,073 in 2017. That year included not just the deaths of six Muslim men in a Quebec City mosque, but also a 50 per cent increase in hate crimes across Quebec the following month.
All this, of course, is more serious than simply yelling at people to go back where they came from. Such racism is far more commonplace. “Every couple weeks, there’ll be some example in Canada of someone telling someone to ‘Go back where you came from,’” says Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. “It’s the go-to catchphrase that doesn’t involve the N-word or the K-word to yell at somebody. But for all intents and purposes, it’s the same thing.” Balgord’s group tracks hate crimes in Canada, but this noxious phrase is untraceable. “It’s so pervasive that if there was an increase, I wouldn’t notice. It’s so pervasive that it’s background noise.” Bashir Mohamed, a Somali-Canadian writer and citizen historian living in Edmonton, has heard the phrase hurled at him dozens of times in person. Whenever a white Canadian yells it, Mohamed draws a direct link to our national history of immigration: “There’s always been this idea that there’s a ‘right type’ of immigrant, and Canada is full for everybody else,” he says. “Canada was clearly built on that idea.”
The 19th-century Immigration Act became a clear benchmark for Canadian attitudes toward foreigners. In his book Maximum
Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough, journalist Doug Saunders notes that throughout the latter half of the 1800s, 734,900 British immigrants arrived in Canada—and 1.2 million le , mostly to the United States. It reflected “a net migratory loss of Canadian population of at least 433,000 people,” Saunders writes, “at a time when other former colonies (including those with identical weather) saw growth in the tens of millions.”
At issue was the economy. The government had a decidedly homogeneous, agrarian approach: they wanted white farmers and no one else. This approach was most evident in a massive drive to lure 650,000 farmers from Scandinavia, as well as eastern and central Europe, but exclude non-white immigrants of any kind. “Like the province of British Columbia being called ‘Yellow British Columbia,’ our own province might be called ‘Black Alberta,’ and therefore I think the time has come when immigration should be made a subject of personal control,” C.E. Simmonds, an MP from Lethbridge, told a reporter with the Edmonton Evening Journal in 1911. “If we had personal rights, in this respect I do not think the province would stand for an invasion of coloured people.”
Exclusion applied to almost every non-Caucasian ethnicity, ossifying strict border control that repeatedly pushed vulnerable immigrants back to where they came from. In 1914, the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying 376 Indians, reached the harbour of Vancouver, where it lingered for two full months, its inhabitants frequently starved and dehydrated. A Canadian lawyer with Irish roots, J. Edward Bird, perhaps reminded of his own ancestors, argued for the Indians in court, but the fight was hopeless. The Komagata Maru was sent back to India, where British officials suspected political subversion; in a swi altercation, 16 passengers died and more than 200 were imprisoned. The Canadian government had no regrets. “To admit Orientals in large numbers would mean in the end the extinction of the white peoples,” said B.C.’s premier, Richard McBride, “and
‘IT’S THE GO-TO CATCHPHRASE THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE THE N-WORD OR THE K-WORD’