Perspective: Nativism

Japanese and Chinese immigrants were not the only immigrants facing discrimination in Canada or British Columbia. At the turn of the century, steamer service began to provide East Indians with direct transportation links to Western Canadian ports. They arrived in varying numbers each year. In total some 5,000 Indians, mostly Sikhs, came to British Columbia between 1905 and 1908. Members of moderately wealthy families from the Punjabi region had begun to emigrate from the1870s onwards, when land

improvements, farm consolidation, rising agricultural wages, and road and railway development in India led land-owners, particularly from the Jat Sikh caste, to send single male relatives abroad. They were to send back remittances to help pay down debts at home. In British Columbia, in part due to the first Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908 these migrant workers took jobs previously filled by Chinese and Japanese immigrants who now faced stiffer entrance requirements and restrictions. 2

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