Gatekeepers

Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada, a 2006 historical study by Franca Iacovetta, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, ,investigates how the experiences of immigrants to Canada in the decades after World War II were determined by “gatekeepers,” the social workers, mental health professionals, child-care experts, welfare administrators and newspaper reporters who collectively worked to shape new immigrants into model Canadian citizens. Iacovetta ultimately shows how this little-known history sheds “new light on connections between the political, social, gender, sexual, and immigrant history of early Cold War Canada and the politics of citizenship in a postwar capitalist democracy.” Gatekeepers draws on a vast body of sources, including oral accounts and caseworker files.

Iacovetta’s central thesis is that Canada’s gatekeepers tried to shape new arrivals according to a narrow set of “Anglo-Canadian middle-class ideals.” These ideals ranged from a political commitment to democratic capitalism (and against communism) to customs governing child-rearing, marriage, and lifestyle. She argues that these ideals enforced existing dynamics of privilege and power, describing Cold War Canada as “a vertical mosaic in which privilege and opportunity still arise according to class-based, racist, and sexist, including heterosexist, criteria.”

Iacovetta begins her story of immigrants and gatekeepers by describing the people who arrived in Canada in the early years of the Cold War. Finding that they were overwhelmingly young people, she also notes that new arrivals had a strong preference for Ontario over other destinations. They came primarily from Holland, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet states. Due to the Canadian government’s “White Canada” policy, most non-white immigrants were excluded, as were migrants suspected of communist sympathies. At the same time, the Canadian government was under pressure to admit migrants, both externally from international pro-refugee movements and internally due to labor shortages.



The influx of migrants raised concerns about political, sexual, and moral deviance. The newcomers were targeted by social and medical professionals, whose goal was to integrate the migrants by making them conform to “Canadian ways.” Iacovetta argues that the function of the Canadian welfare state was to encourage “continuing obedience to the needs and demands of the economic order and its ruling elites.” In this light, she finds that the gatekeepers’ “modest form of cultural pluralism” was designed to be “least threatening to the state and its dominant classes.” Above all, the gatekeepers were concerned to instill bourgeois values.

Iacovetta focuses her attention on two institutions: the Citizenship Branch of the federal government and the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto. Although she credits them with good intentions, she finds that their primary concern was to decontaminate immigrants by cleansing them of their dangerously foreign ideas and customs: “The newcomers were expected to perform their role as pleasing, decorative symbols of Canadian tolerance and pluralism, and to perform an ethnicity that was a carefully contained presentation of music, costumes, dances, handicrafts, and food.”

Similarly, Iacovetta finds that the gatekeepers were determined to reshape the domestic lives of new arrivals. Dieticians, social workers, food journalists, and nurses passed judgment on migrants’ eating habits, refashioning them in the image of Canada’s “pro-capitalist and pro-democracy ideal of family and kitchen consumerism.” Similarly, social workers and other gatekeepers intervened in relationships, promoting “conservative and contradictory family values that privileged a white (which in English Canada meant Anglo-Celtic), middle-class, and heterosexual nuclear household.” By portraying traumatized European men as a particular threat to Canadian women, gatekeepers “sidestepped the damage done to women everywhere in the name of male privilege.”



Iacovetta focuses on the particularly difficult experiences of women who had suffered during the war, as victims, refugees, and sometimes, Nazi work-camp internees. Canadian gatekeepers lacked a frame of reference for these extreme traumas, passing moral judgment on the “sexual delinquency” of traumatized women. They attempted to mold all immigrant women into “responsible wives and mothers capable of making a good partnership with a responsible man and raising a future generation of healthy and well-adjusted Canadian children.” Women from Europe were also considered a particular espionage threat, and the RCMP used illiberal surveillance and deportation tactics to secure Canada from such real or imagined dangers, measures Iacovetta calls “a Canadian brand of McCarthyism, with its guilt by association tactics.” She examines the overlap of “sexual and political subversives” in the Canadian imagination by examining the trials of several female spies, including that of Gerda Munsinger.

In her concluding chapter, Iacovetta summarizes the relationship between immigrants and gatekeepers, examining its impact. She argues that the gatekeepers insisted on conceptualizing immigrants “as fragile or damaged women, men, and children in need of sympathy, patience, support, guidance, and psychological or moral rehabilitation as well as training in participatory democracy and citizenship.” Though well-intentioned, to meet this perceived need, gatekeepers “willingly intruded into people’s lives and regulated or punished those who transgressed dominant norms.” Iacovetta closes the book by examining the legacy of the Cold War gatekeepers in contemporary Canada’s repressive response to the threat of Islamic extremism.