History
Canada has a very long history of East Asian immigration over the past 100 years. During the 19th century, many Chinese arrived to take part in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Chinese who came from Guangdong Province blasted and chiseled the treacherous western stretch of railway through the Canadian Rockies. Japanese also had arrived in the 1890s and became fishermen and merchants in British Columbia. In 1923, the federal government passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which banned all Chinese immigration. With this act, all other non-whites were restricted to come. In 1947, the act was repealed.
During and after the Vietnam War, a large wave of Vietnamese refugees began arriving in Canada. The Canadian Parliament created the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada in 1985 to better address issues surrounding Canada-Asia relations, including trade, citizenship and immigration. When Hong Kong reverted to mainland Chinese rule, people emigrated and found new homes in Canada.
In recent decades, a large number of Indians from South Asia have come to Canada.
Today, Asian Canadians form a significant minority within the population, and over 3 million Asians call Canada their home.
Read more about this topic: Asian Canadian
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)