“We are all immigrants.” The phrase has become a popular slogan of opposition to the closing of borders in Canada and the United States.
It has been written on protest signs held high against Donald Trump’s ban on nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries, and echoed by Canadian politicians proclaiming their acceptance of refugees from countries like Syria.
“We understand that as Canadians we are almost all immigrants, and that no one should be excluded on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality,” said Toronto mayor John Tory, for instance, in response to Trump’s “Muslim ban.”
The claim that we are a country of immigrants is meant to be a statement of open arms to those outside the borders, but it closes our eyes to the hierarchies that exist within them.
“We are all immigrants” hides the violence of settler colonialism by calling it immigration.
“Misrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the ‘official story’ of a mostly benign and benevolent U.S.A., and to mask the fact that the pre-U.S. independence settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters, just as they were in Africa and India,” acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out.
Settlers, unlike most immigrants, do not seek to join a society as it exists, but to create a new one by destroying what was already there. “Immigration” is a gross euphemism for an exercise that has entailed the genocide of indigenous peoples, committed in Canada using means such as smallpox blankets and forced sterilizations and sexual violence and residential schools.
“We are all immigrants” deletes the fact that black people who were enslaved did not travel here voluntarily, but were transported forcibly — not only to the United States, but to Canada as well, where slavery was legal until 1834.
The assertion that Canada is a nation of immigrants excises the thousands of black people enslaved in Canada from our history. It expunges from our self-representation people such as Olivier Le Jeune, the first enslaved African in Canada, who was brought to New France from Madagascar as a six-year-old boy in 1628 by British commander Sir David Kirke.
And like Marie-Joseph Angelique, an enslaved black woman who was brutally tortured and hanged in 1734 in Montreal, for allegedly setting fire to her mistress’s home after she threatened to sell her.
“Is ‘immigrants’ the appropriate designation for the indigenous peoples of North America? No. Is ‘immigrants’ the appropriate designation for enslaved Africans? No. Is ‘immigrants’ the appropriate designation for the original European settlers? No,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz.
“We are all immigrants” also obscures the reality of deep inequalities between different groups of people that have migrated to Canada.
The slogan covers over the truth that some move here and live here on far more privileged terms than others; that we may inhabit the same piece of land but we are not all in the same boat.
“Not all immigrants are equal,” Carleton University Professors Frances Abele and Daiva Stasiulis remind us. “Throughout the history of this country, many different peoples have come, often in flight from poverty or persecution at home, only to find themselves exploited here.”
This was true for the 17,000 Chinese men brought in as cheap and expendable railway workers in the 1880s; they were paid a fraction of the wage earned by white workers, and many hundreds of them died doing the most perilous jobs.
And it continues to be true today. For example, certain “highly skilled” immigrants and business entrepreneurs are given preferential access to permanent residence. But the temporary migrant workers that Canada uses to perform essential labour — such as farming the food we eat and making the clothes we wear and disposing of the waste we produce — are denied secure status, often trapped in abusive and dangerous working conditions with low pay.
“Racialized workers are overrepresented in the latter cohort, perpetuating the historical racial inequalities in immigration selection,” according to the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants.
As a Muslim, I have been deeply moved by recent displays of solidarity against efforts to keep Muslims out of the United States. But we cannot build a more just world by perpetuating unjust myths, including the fairy-tale that we are all immigrants here.
Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst and writer based in Toronto.
Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst and writer based in Toronto.
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