Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Pacific Rim into an integrated economic region. These three high-profile
accounts, appearing within a three-month window in the city's main news-
paper, presented a common narrative. Each included a photograph of a
young, dynamic male entrepreneur, a recent immigrant from East Asia. All
three businessmen had been sent to university in Canada or the United
States, and in their dark business suits each conveyed a quintessential image
of the enterprising self-made man, the cosmopolitan capitalist,
homo eco-
nomicus
. The discourse of youth, energy and success was all the more potent
in 1998 as British Columbia laboured through another economic slow-
down; indeed, real income fell in Vancouver during the 1990s. The photo-
graphs and accompanying text projected a counter-trend, a fresh beginning,
economic vigour to re-boot regional development. A City report had antic-
ipated as much: 'These new immigrants tend to be very entrepreneurial,
and provide much of Vancouver's contemporary economic dynamism' (City
of Vancouver 1988).
2
Itemizing entrepreneurialism, networks in Asia and a
large stock of human and financial capital, Asia-Pacific booster Michael
Goldberg was equally upbeat about East Asian migration: 'all the impact
has been positive' (cited in Siklos 1989). These are exactly the economic
agents that the Business Immigration Programme was designed to deliver.
In this chapter after an initial discussion of the scale of capital transfers
accompanying the BIP, we move beyond the political economy of flows
themselves to the calculations of the agents who shaped and populated them,
to the network of meanings, the hopes and fears that coursed through trans-
Pacific life lines. Not only were immigrants trying to solve complex calcula-
tions as they compared apples and oranges on opposite sides of the Pacific,
but the state was also shrewd, as it drew immigrants into the web of its own
accountability and audit culture following a facilitated landing through the
BIP. A position of accountability and containment presented an unfamiliar
location for East Asian business households and turned some of them against
Canadian apples, rekindling their taste for Mandarin oranges.
Cornucopia from Asia Pacific
The Government of Canada publishes annual statistics on the impacts
of the Business Immigration Programme as part of its process of public
accountability. Data are readily accessible on the Citizenship and Immi-
gration Canada (CIC) web site, where they fortify press releases and
thereby become the numerical grist for media stories. Consequently they
comprise the public face of BIP impacts. Impressive outcomes are declared
in the confident language of official statistics, a calculated message convey-
ing the authority of numeracy, evoking precision and accuracy. As Nikolas
Rose has observed in a more general discussion on quantification and the
