A sociobiological perspective on migrations

The terms used to describe migrants can reveal much about those who use the terms. In the early 1930s, the period of my earliest conscious memories, cartoons in the gutter press in Australia conveyed frightening images of sinister slant-eyed men, the mythical 'Yellow Peril' who threatened to overwhelm the sturdy but sparsely distributed blue-eyed, fair-complexioned Australians of British stock who were sprinkled across the south-east corner of the desert continent with denser clusters in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities on that long coast facing the South-West Pacific Ocean. The journalists and the owners of the gutter press were deliberately vague about the nationality of those they described as the yellow peril. Were they Chinese? Japanese? Burmese? Indonesian? (Not this: In the 1930s Indonesia didn't exist: it emerged in 1947, the outcome of a colonial war of liberation of the Dutch East Indies that was watched nervously by press, politicians and the public in Australia). 

There were massive and often bloodstained regional population realignments in and after  wars of liberation from colonial status, for instance after the partition of British colonial India into India and Pakistan.  A consequence of the liberation wars in south and south-east Asia were large migrations into Western Europe: Dutch-speaking Indonesians into Holland, French-speaking Vietnamese into France, English-speaking Indians and Pakistanis into Britain.  In 1961-62 I walked every day across the north-east corner of what had previously been Cockney east end City of London with a long history of receiving migrants -- Huguenots, Jewish refugees from Russia and the Baltic States, more Jews escaping from Hitler, then the influx I observed from East Pakistan, which 10 years later became Bangladesh. I suggested to Jerry Morris that the Social Medicine Research Unit should keep an eye on the population redistribution going on around Brick Lane which was becoming a little enclave of East Pakistan.  But I couldn't articulate a relevant research question clearly enough, though doubtless there were some well within the scope of one of the MRC Research Units. Walking past Brick Lane one day in the winter of 1961-62 I first heard the pejorative term 'Paki' applied venomously to these slender and beautiful sari-clad young women from the deltas of the Ganges and the Bramaputra Rivers.   Not long after then there were race riots in Bradford and other cities in the north of England, sparked partly by insulting language used to describe immigrants from South Asia.    

In Australia in the 1950s,the acronym DP (displaced persons) was applied blanket fashion to all immigrants, even those like our friends Dodie and Harald Ziemer who paid their own way to Australia. Sometimes it stigmatized, like the current Oz term 'asylum seekers' - implying that they are somehow inferior, but really just the 21st century way to express xenophobia I don't think we are as bigoted in Canada but I haven't seen an opinion survey and it's hard to read the tea leaves.

The Canadian policy and practice of multiculturalism were powerful attractions to Wendy and me, and we saw many examples of the successful application of multiculturalism. I saw it close-up in the successive 'families' of 84 medical students who passed through my first-year class every year. They were truly rainbow classes in which all variations of skin pigmentation, hair texture, and on special occasions, ethnic costumes, were displayed. I was privileged to have many contact hours exposure to those first year students, watched as they bonded into a single large 'family' and observed assortative mating occurring, often across ethnic and cultural 'boundaries' that these nubile youngsters ignored. I've stayed in contact with enough of these ethnically diverse couples to observe some flourish and others fail for reasons tht had nothing to do with their diversity. At longer range I've observed Canadian multiculturalism being nurtured at grade school level, at the French Immersion First Avenue School at the other end of the block I live on. In the playground the little children play and lark about - in English, spoken with widely diverse accents - with complete disregard for irrelevancies like skin pigmentation and hair texture. 

Canada, this easy-going tolerant multicultural nation could very easily absorb tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. All that stands in the way is the bigotry and intolerance of our current  government. I hope they are resoundingly swept from office next month!