TRANSACTIONS 



OF 



THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE 



IMMIGRATION. 

 By Gilbert E. Jackson, B.A. 



{Read i6th November, igi2.) 

 The Canadian Institute of Toronto is naturally more interested 

 in the Canadian problem than in the subject of immigration as a whole. 

 That problem may be approached from more than one standpoint. 

 The railway magnate or investor is more concerned with the volume and 

 future volume of incoming foreigners than with considerations as to 

 their quality and the forces which attract immigrants of different kinds. 

 The statesman, on the other hand, and not only the statesman, but the 

 private citizen, is more concerned to know the composition of our vast 

 mass of immigrants than its volume and the causes at work which 

 regulate the proportion of Greeks and Russians, English and Italians, 

 Jews and Hungarians and Poles to one another. He is aware that it is 

 this which will determine the future nationality of Canada; he is inter- 

 ested to know whether Slav or Latin or Anglo-Saxon will dominate the 

 rest ; and (since he probably holds certain very definite ideas as to what 

 should be the Canadian nationality) he wishes to find out if any of his 

 actions will help or hinder the attainment of his ideal. It is an accepted 

 principle in the United States that no discrimination on the score of 

 race can be practised against European nations; and what a people of 

 ninety millions cannot afford to do, is still more impossible for us. But 

 there must be certain things in Canada which attract or repel certain 

 races; and it is easily possible for us so to arrange these as not to dis- 

 courage those immigrants whom we desire, and not to bring in a larger 

 number than would otherwise come of the peoples whom we do not 

 want. It will be the task of future students of immigration to study 

 those forces and the means of bringing them beneath control. 



The idea which forms the subject of the present paper, occurred 

 to the writer in the spring of 1912, when after reading little and seeing 

 much of the street life of Toronto, he was in a position at any rate to 

 tell the outlines of the problem. To the newcomer the outstanding 

 feature about immigrant life in Toronto is its segregation.* A very short 



*" We have to-day our little Italys, little Russias, little Syrias, and so on, in our midst, 

 vortex-rings of nationality, closed to the outside medium in which they live, though 

 possibly shifting en masse from one place to another as the currents of economic demand 

 bear them. Such results were not known with the earlier British, German and Scandi- 

 navian populations." — Prescott F. Hall, " Immigration and its Effects upon the United 

 States", Part II., ch. viii., pp. 177, 178. 



