Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
discerning 'a gap between [the state's] grasp and reach'. Such an imperfect
accountability culture provides space for enterprising actors to turn events
to their own advantage, while providing the government with the unaudited
quantitative returns to keep the annual scorecard cranking out its reassur-
ing numbers. It was significant in this regard that managers I interviewed
working in the programme at the federal and provincial levels were genu-
inely uncertain of the impacts of the BIP in even the most general of terms.
They had evidently made their own tacit assessment of the validity of the
annual scorecard.
But if the state played the globalization game imperfectly, what of the mil-
lionaire migrants? For some, the relationship with the state through the BIP
had some of the features of a
danse macabre
. For entrepreneurs, economic
returns have been meagre and financial losses common from the impossible
task of establishing a successful business in the required window of two
years, while working, either in a crowded enclave economy or operating
outside the enclave in an unfamiliar language, in a nation with an alien eco-
nomic culture of high taxation and a disabling protocol of licensing and
regulations. As we saw from the transcripts, the business outcomes could be
stressful, confidence-sapping and highly frustrating. Their lack of local
knowledge fatally compromised their cosmopolitan billing. The framing of
'cosmopolitan capitalists' seems to have overlooked the inconveniences
of geographical difference.
However, the subjectivity of many millionaire migrants was far from deter-
mined by these exchanges as virtual wards of the state. This qualified inde-
pendence was not only due to the limited capacity of the governmental
regime they encountered. For while the details of economic life in Canada
took many of them by surprise, their general expectations of business success
were evidently limited from the beginning. Many migrants were too astute to
assume an unproblematic transferability of entrepreneurial skills that had
worked so well in East Asia. Surveys in Hong Kong in the early 1990s dis-
closed considerable uneasiness among potential migrants about economic
prospects in Canada and other countries competing for their talents. Landing
cards completed at ports of entry showed that a surprisingly high proportion
of migrants in the business streams (primarily investors) were not planning
to work in Canada at all. Surveys reported in earlier chapters demonstrated
that, especially in Vancouver the preferred destination of millionaire migrants,
economic motives were unexpectedly absent in triggering their trans-Pacific
migration, despite terms of entry requiring them to prime economic develop-
ment in their chosen destination. Some families had already fixed upon the
astronaut strategy even before they had left Hong Kong or Taiwan, sustaining
their East Asian asset base while moving to Canada for non-economic rea-
sons. Transnational life undercut the governmental intent to contain the new
residents and their vaunted entrepreneurial capabilities within the borders of
