Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the nation state as the terms of the BIP had anticipated. When the screws
were turned by the state in the foreign assets disclosure legislation in the late
1990s, a number of immigrants chose departure from Canada to negate this
attempt at national accountability. But mobility rather than stasis was just
one of the end runs of these 'flexible citizens' around the confinements and
expectations set up by the state. More pervasive was limited economic per-
formance, sometimes planned, sometimes unintended.
So emerged the astonishing paradox of the millionaire migrant as news-
paper delivery boy in the highly publicized and tragic murder case reported
in Chapter 1. So it was that among a class of 30 adult language students
from East Asia every one acknowledged losing money in Canada. So it was
that in a focus group of business immigrants the statement that 'Many
people here are only working for their pocket money' passed without com-
ment. So it was that immigrant families living in million dollar houses could
declare annual incomes below the official poverty line. The very existence of
these paradoxes revealed also that millionaire migrants had careers and cash
streams 'off-line', independent of their apparent tutelage to the disciplines
of the Canadian state. These events were not particular to Canada. As we
have seen throughout the discussion, a similar set of experiences and out-
comes unfolded in Australia and New Zealand, but in Canada with the
largest of the business immigration programmes these results were more
substantial and more fully articulated. Analogous outcomes in all three
countries suggest structural deficiencies in business programmes and their
pre-suppositions, not least in the cosmopolitan assumption that business
skills are portable and the governmentality assumption that the state has
adequate regulatory capacity.
This is not to deny the economic role of the immigration from East Asia
that cascaded investment to Canada in the years following the Sino-British
Joint Declaration for the future of Hong Kong in 1984. But a key recogni-
tion must be that immigrants came more as consumers than producers, their
economic benefits measureable not in new factories but in a red hot con-
struction industry, not in trans-Pacific trade but in the sale of import cars
and consumer durables, not in resource development but in nurturing an
education industry active outside normal school hours. They also helped to
re-shape an urban society and its landscape. But they largely partitioned off
their own revenue-generating activity to the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Geographies of Transnationalism
The millionaire migrants from East Asia, engaging in temporary and circular
movement across the Pacific to destinations in Australia, New Zealand,
Canada, and elsewhere provide an exemplary model of transnational
