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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

S'organiser pour négocier ?

Résumé

“None is too many.” This sentence summarizes the Canadian immigration policy during the Second World War. For the historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper, who wrote the seminal history book None Is Too Many. Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948, the Canadian government and public opinion refused to receive Jewish refugees. Even the Canadian Jewry and their allies did not succeed in obtaining asylum for European refugees. Abella and Troper described Canada as “the worst of all possible refugee-receiving states,” since fewer than 5,000 Jews did find refuge within the country. Questioning how Canada granted asylum during WWII, what I study is not so much what the pro-refugee actors did not do, but rather what they actually did do. So, my thesis examines the negotiations that were at stake in this issue, as well as the accommodation of the refugees and their ways of life in Canada. My research is based on the archives of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) and the Canadian National Committee on Refugees (CNCR), the two Canadian organisations that were at the core of the pro-refugee lobby, the latter constituting a rather complex network that gathered Jewish and non-sectarian associations, Canadian and American organisations. This paper aims to examine the external negotiations over and internal discussions of the asylum of refugees that took place within this pro-refugee network. The first external negotiations were aimed at the federal government: accommodating refugees and liberalizing the Canadian immigration policy. The Jewish leaders and members of both the CNCR and CJC met the Minister of Mines and Resources, who managed the immigration policy. However, the real negotiations were conducted by the CNCR since its members were closer to the political power. So, The CJC seemed to be excluded from the process. In order to justify its refusal to grant asylum, the government put forward the fact that public opinion was against the accommodation of refugees, especially Jewish refugees. As a result, the Canadian network had to convince the Canadians to change their minds. That was the second external negotiation and once again, the CJC and the CNCR worked together. Their propaganda was twofold: on the one hand, the CJC worked with the Jewish media and portrayed the refugees as persecuted people, on the other hand, the CNCR worked with the Christian media and portrayed the refugees as useful immigrants. Indeed, the network was divided about the strategy to follow: who should be privileged? The “most irreplaceable” or the most perfect migrant? These discussions/arguments divided the network and especially its Jewish members. Indeed, some Jews did not understand the discretion of the CJC and blamed the latter of wasting money in a low-priority cause. Thus, the asylum and the accommodation of refugees were not unanimous issues within the Canadian Jewry.

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Dates et versions

hal-02526904 , version 1 (31-03-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02526904 , version 1

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Annelise Rodrigo. S'organiser pour négocier ? : Le réseau associatif canadien pour l'accueil de réfugiés durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Négocier l'accueil. Migrants, réfugiés et sociétés d'accueil, Institut historique allemand, Mar 2019, Paris, France. ⟨hal-02526904⟩
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