Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Asia are being carried to Canada where they fit less comfortably. We will see
in the next chapter that the reality of geographical difference between the
two shores of the Pacific also introduced severe challenges to the opera-
tional side of immigrant economic activity. Theorists of a 'flat earth' do not
inhabit the same world as the grounded practitioners from East Asia who
run up against the pervasive spatial variation across the Pacific every time
they open their mouths, let alone open a business.
But this is to run ahead of the argument. In this chapter I have docu-
mented the fruit of Canada's Asia-Pacific mission, the delivery of vast
resources of financial and human capital from the mid-1980s accompany-
ing the Business Immigration Programme, resources enumerated in the cal-
culations of the neo-liberal state. For the 'cosmopolitan capitalists' (Hamilton
1999), the decision to move to Canada was a fine balance, easily unsettled
by perceived or actual conditions in origin or destination. Their own calcu-
lations led to discomfort, for fresh from the economic triumphs of East
Asian development, the Canadian economy was much less attractive. But
Canada had palpable advantages too: civil rights, relatively unpolluted envi-
ronments, educational opportunities, leisure amenities, the welfare state
and the promise of citizenship. Weighing and comparing was never easy.
Some families made immediate adjustments moving into the circular
motion of astronaut households, others waited out the period to citizenship
before returning, others again made a decision to become settlers. But
whatever strategy they employed they ran into the presence of the state as
an active and usually unwelcome presence. On occasion, notably the for-
eign assets disclosure legislation, the state's regulation could tip the balance
and send households back on another trans-Pacific crossing. But the immi-
grants were far from passive victims. They actively engaged undesirable
policies with political lobbying and, for some, quieter subversion. Beneath
an abstract space of economic flows of migrants and capital lay a profoundly
human topography of persuasion and improvisation.
