Asian Indians in Canada

SIGNIFICANCE: Asian Indian immigrants entering North America are generally highly educated professionals who are entrepreneurial and transnational in their orientation. Their ongoing contributions to both Canada and their homeland continue to be significant.

Asian Indians, also known as South Asian Indians or East Indians, have a migratory tradition and are found in almost every part of the world. For statistical purposes, the people who claim India as their homeland are often lumped under the South Asian category, which includes people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka.

The Early Years

Asian Indians started entering Canada in significant numbers in 1903, a year after the coronation of Edward VII. On the way to the coronation pageantry, a small, multiethnic contingent from the Crown Colony of Hong Kong stopped in Vancouver. Among the party were twenty-three Sikhs from the Punjab, a butterfly-shaped region that covers part of India and part of Pakistan. The Sikhs, who wear kirpan and turbans and have uncut beards, were so well received in Canada that some of them, joined by other Sikhs, returned the next year as immigrants, beginning a long history of Sikhs in Canada.

At the time, the Canadian Pacific Railroad needed laborers and steamship companies lacked passengers. Therefore, both recruited Japanese and Indians, first in Hong Kong and then in the Punjab. Punjabis mortgaged their land at interest rates of 10 percent to 12 percent to get the sixty-five-dollar passage to Vancouver, where they worked in lumbering and mining and for railroads, making twelve times what they could in Punjab. Forty-three South Asians entered in 1904–1905 and 2,623 in 1907–1908. By 1908, the Asian Indian population in Canada had reached about 5,000, mostly Sikhs residing in Vancouver, whose objective was to return to Punjab wealthy and to buy land.

Because the numbers of Japanese and Asian Indians increased so rapidly and the bearded and turbaned Sikhs were highly visible, anti-Asian sentiment quickly developed. An agreement was reached with the Japanese government to stop emigration to Canada. The Sikhs presented a problem because placing restrictions on them would foster anti-British sentiment in colonized India. To end the influx of Sikhs, the Canadian government raised the head tax on immigrants from $25 to $200 and required all immigrants to arrive in Canada directly from their country of origin without any intermediate stops, which was impossible for anyone sailing from India.

Some Sikhs challenged the regulations by chartering the Komagata Maru and sailing directly to Vancouver on April 4, 1914. Upon arrival, entry was denied to all except twenty-two passengers with proof of return domicile. After a period of turmoil, the remainder returned to Calcutta on September 27, 1914. Canada’s color bar for immigration was established.

The Quiet Period

From 1909 to 1943, only 878 South Asians entered Canada, which did not compensate for the thousand-plus that left during the economic downturns between 1920 and 1930. Canadian law allowed immigrant men to return home for long periods of time (for example, to get married) and to bring their wives and any children under eighteen years of age to Canada; however, the difficulty of registering and manipulating the bureaucracy prohibited many wives and children from actually entering. Sikhs from Punjab remained the dominant group, and most of them lived in Vancouver. Their concerns, however, increasingly began to focus on Canada rather than their native India. They branched out into agriculture, and an entrepreneurial class developed. Some owned sawmills; others ran small businesses. The community changed from a group of men doing hard physical labor so that they could return to Punjab a bara sahib ("big man" or "important person") to a community of families establishing themselves in Canada, making it their permanent home. Gurdwaras (Sikh places of worship) and cultural and religious organizations were founded. Some immigrants maintained their interest in their homeland and supported India’s struggle for independence. Although they made Canada their home, the Sikhs were a minority and were discriminated against by White Canadians. These “unwanted foreigners” were sometimes refused service in stores, were denied the right to vote, and were suspected of being disloyal; their children were taunted by their classmates. However, they were able to survive, even during the economic decline of the 1930s, because they helped one another—Sikhs were seldom reliant on governmental programs like social assistance or income support. It was during this period that Sikhs won the right to vote.

Policy Changes

After World War II, Canada became a world player and not only took on responsibilities such as helping refugees but also became an example in such areas as human rights. Consequently, the nation began to change its immigration policy, starting with the Immigration Act of 1947. The 1966 White Paper on immigration led to regulations introduced in 1967 that abolished all types of discrimination, promoted family reunification, and set up a point system for unsponsored immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1976 made it clear that Canadian immigration policies would facilitate family reunification, employ nondiscriminatory admission standards, and fulfill Canada’s humanitarian obligation to refugees.

The South Asian population responded to each legislative change. Between 1945 and 1955, 1,139 South Asians were admitted; from 1956 to 1962, 4,088; and from 1963 to 1967, 12,856. After the 1967 change in immigration law, 30,501 Asian Indians entered between 1968 and 1972 and 57,411 between 1973 and 1977. In 1996, 235,930 of Canada’s 4.9 million immigrants, or 4.8 percent, had been born in India. According to Statistics Canada, from the late 1990s through the early twenty-first century, approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Indians arrived in Canada each year, making India and China the countries sending the largest number of immigrants to Canada each year.

Meanwhile, South Asians, both immigrants and Canadian-born, constituted the largest visible minority group in the country in the 2011 census, making up 25 percent of the visible minority population and 4.8 percent of the total population. By the early 2020s, there were over 2.6 million individuals of South Asian origin in Canada, making up over 35 percent of the country's Asian population and 7 percent of the total population. This was nearly quadruple the number recorded in 1996.

Changes in the Immigrant Population

Under the new immigration laws, the characteristics of the South Asian and Asian Indian populations in Canada changed. The 1967 legislation established a point system, giving preference to those with the education and skills needed in Canada. South Asia, particularly India, had many highly educated medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and managers who quickly emigrated. Most were urban-oriented, English-speaking individuals from Delhi, Bombay, and Ahmedabad. They had been educated in a British-oriented system and were familiar with Western ways. Many brought their families with them.

The majority of these new immigrants were not part of the Sikh network and saw Toronto as a place of opportunity. Therefore, the center for Asian Indians and South Asians became Toronto, and the population was no longer dominated by Punjabi Sikhs but included Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jains, from places including Gujarat, Kerala, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Rather than working in manual labor or service jobs, these new immigrants were often businesspeople or scientists, and many reached high positions in their fields. They benefited Canada by giving it some of the best talent the world had to offer and aided their homeland by sending remittances to relatives and enabling a transfer of technology.

Anti-Asian sentiment and violence broke out in Canada, especially in Toronto and Vancouver, in the 1970s. Still, by the 1990s, Asian Indians in Canada were a prosperous minority and enjoyed a much higher level of acceptance than in previous decades. In the 2020s, violence reemerged between the Sikh and Indian populations in Canada after the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh leader in British Columbia. Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India's government of orchestrating the murder, sparking diplomatic tension between Canada and India. By late 2024, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had uncovered clandestine crimes acted out by Indian diplomats and consular officials living in Canada. Tensions continued between Hindu Indians and Sikh populations in Canada, with protests sometimes erupting into violent confrontations.

Bibliography

Buchignani, Norman. "South Asian Canadians." Canadian Encyclopedia, 11 Sept. 2023, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/south-asians. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

Edmonston, Barry, and Eric Fong, editors. The Changing Canadian Population. McGill-Queen's UP, 2010.

Fong, Eric, et al., editors. Immigrant Adaptation in Multi-Ethnic Societies: Canada, Taiwan, and the United States. Routledge, 2013.

Hirji, Faiza. Dreaming in Canadian: South Asian Youth, Bollywood, and Belonging. UBC P, 2010.

"A Statistical Snapshot of Asians in Canada." Statistics Canada, 2 May 2024, www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/6178-statistical-snapshot-asians-canada. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

"The Story of Indian Immigration to Canada." CIC News, Apr. 2014, www.cicnews.com/2014/04/story-indian-immigration-canada-043365.html. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.