Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
re-examination of national policy expectations. For the assimilation paradigm
also anticipates the containment of the immigrant by the nation state and
his/her reconstitution as a national citizen. But the transnational migrant
with mobile identities who eludes the possessive arms of the state has under-
cut this traditional assimilation model.
For transnational migrants, cross-border networks provide access to
assets and resources not restricted to the territory of a single nation state; in
our case they comprise connections and flows between the nodes of a social
field that criss-crosses the Pacific Ocean. In Chapter 2 the establishment of
that field is discussed with the rise in the 1960s and 1970s of the concept of
the Pacific Rim in the imagination of Canadian politicians and business
elites. In a notable reversal of geographical mythologies, the 'Gold Mountain'
projected onto North America by nineteenth-century Chinese migrants
was relocated to a supposed El Dorado in East and Southeast Asia sought
by late twentieth-century North Americans. Expecting to find new trade
and investment opportunities in the context of post-1973 recessions and
growing federal deficits that disabled the welfare state, Canadian missions
crossed the Pacific to drum up business, while governments made legisla-
tive and institutional adjustments in Canada so that investors and immi-
grants would have a soft landing. British Columbia and its principal
entrepôt
,
Vancouver, became increasingly incorporated into a Pacific Basin system of
flows as growing tonnages of raw materials moved westward, while imports
and foreign direct investment, at first principally from Japan, entered the
province. These economic linkages were accompanied by rising numbers of
people from East Asia, with many arrivals, particularly from Hong Kong
and Taiwan, landing as business immigrants and seemingly sustaining the
neo-liberal developmental paradigm.
Chapter 3 moves from aggregate flows to intersubjective meanings, the
intentionality of business immigrants as active agents. Transnational net-
works are not limited to the much-discussed circuitry of flows, measurable
movements of capital, people, information and commodities. They also
reflect and shape lines of meaning, the experience of lives lived; they invoke
memories, hopes and social relationships across a distended social field.
Business immigrants brought with them impressive resources of human
and financial capital. Nonetheless they approached the economic develop-
ment agenda flourished by Canadian governments with considerable ambiv-
alence and some anxiety. Departure from the bull markets of East Asia to the
slow if steady returns and high taxation of Canada was a dubious economic
proposition, and migration was seen much more as a project to maximize
family objectives: geopolitical security, educational options for children,
quality of life for the nuclear family and often ageing parents. Canada was
one of several possible destinations, and with the advice of immigration
consultants, the international market was scanned with care. So began an
