African Caribbean Migration

Writing Myself into the Story

It is important for me to start by identifying that I am coming to this topic through my own history as an African Caribbean immigrant to Turtle Island, and more specifically, the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit. When my mother immigrated to the lands now known as Canada, she was seeking a better life not unlike most people from the Caribbean in the 1970s. For her, immigration appeared to offer the possibility to improve the quality of her and her family’s life choices and chances. She had no official help to immigrate, no invitation, and very little knowledge about the land she was moving to, only a need to take the chance to escape from the Caribbean’s long-standing economic hardship (Bowen, 2007). She needed to earn a living to take care of herself and her children and there were no jobs available to her in Trinidad. In the Caribbean, the economic hardship was not an individual or new issue neither was the idea of moving to somewhere else to find work. It is still not uncommon for people seeking employment to expect to migrate within the Caribbean region or move away altogether (Thomas-Hope, 1992). Indeed, the exploitation of African descendants as movable labor is part and parcel of a history of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean; moreover, the problems of movement and labor are not new but rather extensions of the history of the dispossession of lands and practices of extraction from both the Caribbean and Africa.

Historicizing Social Work and the African Caribbean Peoples in Canada

Social work is not neutral (Lundy, 2011), it is a reflection of society’s beliefs and values about itself and others. Industrialization and urbanization in the late 1800s and early 1900s contributed to the development of social work that was built upon the individual troubles of European immigrants. In Canada, Charlotte Whitton was an early neoconservative and influential social worker supportive of assimilation, eugenics, and an anti-immigration stance (McLaren, 2008). The conflation of immigration with assimilation, individualism, and deservedness exemplified her belief in the early charity model approach to social work that focused on privatized helping rather than on an expansion of the welfare state (Hick, 2002). Other social workers of the time, like J. S. Woodsworth, who was part of the social gospel movement, advocated for change on a systemic level in relation to class. Both of these figures had a significant impact on the development of social work and they both actively participated in Canadian politics. Their social work and political participation on behalf of others mirrored the race-based values of the larger society that was also anti-immigrant. The exclusion of African Caribbean immigrants from the country (Schultz, 1982) and more generally from the accounts of social work history (see, e.g., Jennissen & Lundy, 2011) clearly highlight how social work has been anything but neutral.

The history of colonization provides an important social context for understanding the roots of the profession and the issues faced by those seeking or required to interact with social workers. African Caribbean migration, in this case to Canada, must be understood as a response to colonization not only in the Caribbean but also in Africa and globally. Migration is once again a lightening rod for social work’s current relationship with people on the move, and migration globally at this moment can be understood as primarily forced through economic, political, and social inequity and upheaval. Social work can no longer pretend that colonization is not an issue or that being able to respond to its impacts and legacies is optional. The Canadian response to the immigration of African Caribbean people as part of colonial policies and practices has been to restrict their access to entry into Canada (Calliste, 1994; Satzewich, 1989) and/or to expedite their deportation when they are in conflict with the law regardless of the seriousness of the crime or their immigration status (Barnes, 2009). These responses reflect the legacy of European invasion, slavery, and colonization in Canada and the Caribbean. The decontextualizing of African Caribbean immigration (i.e., failing to account for the impact of colonization and slavery) serves to maintain relations of dominance and minimizes the realities of exploitation and oppression in the lives of these immigrants seeking a better life.

To explore the stories of African Caribbean migration is to necessarily discuss a history of violence and harm enacted upon Indigenous peoples across many lands through European slavery and colonization. The Caribbean is an example of a space impacted by multiple and overlapping layers of European colonization, slavery, and resistance. The violence of European colonization enacted upon and against the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean was also reinforced by the European colonization of Africa, which included the enslavement of Indigenous peoples of Africa forcibly transported to the Caribbean. Colonization in the Caribbean through the use of slavery and indentured labor to produce sugar produced a country like Trinidad and Tobago with its diverse cultures and peoples, resulting in multiple layers of European colonization that have significantly impacted African Caribbean resistance and migration.

Migration of African Caribbean people from the Caribbean to the global North is connected to the history of the Caribbean before and after Columbus. The intentional use and violence enacted upon Indigenous peoples in the global South is matched only by the ongoing destruction of the land, the air, and the water. The practices of colonization used on the Indigenous peoples of North America were previously honed over hundreds of years in the Caribbean, which functioned like a training ground for the French, Spanish, and British. It is not a surprise then that African Caribbean people have resisted slavery and colonization by fighting back and trying to escape from its rippling effects by moving away.

The devastation of colonization and slavery requires that social work addresses the impacts upon the lives of the peoples affected. Indigenous peoples globally have been disposed of, kidnapped from, and quarantined to resource-depleted lands by colonization and slavery. When social work ignores the history of slavery and colonization and its ongoing legacies, it normalizes the dominant as neutral. Without history and context, migration can quickly become the limited story of an individualized experience. These dominant narratives are found, for example, in popular cultural production of television shows depicting competitive survival and travel. Survival shows (e.g., Survivor, Naked, and Afraid) represent the myth of the individualized response to the threat of harm from nature in uninhabited spaces. Competitive travel shows, on the other hand, such as the Amazing Race, serve to reinscribe the myth about the freedom of movement in and among preoccupied spaces with Indigenous peoples represented as exotic backdrops for competition. These shows perpetuate the myths of individualism and uninhabited wild spaces that are waiting to be dominated, and the hope for a better life becomes entangled with these representations of freedom of movement and survival. This binary of being empowered to survive but only as an individual leaves out issues of structural violence and oppression. These shows position the individual as neutral free to move from place to place without exclusion, while Indigenous people are nonexistent or remain part of the flora and fauna. There is no space given to structural inequity.

A Better Life?

What makes this life through immigration better and what is it better than? The rationale for migration of seeking a better life obscures the reality of moving from one kind of poverty to another. Low-paying employment can provide currency to participate in the economy, but issues of quality and choice in that participation often remain out of reach for Africa Caribbeans who face multiple forms of oppression with limited opportunities for employment. The implication of the word “better” is that there is a hierarchy of life opportunities and that equitable chances for living a better life can be attained by moving to a neutral place free from oppression. The lived experience of migration for African Caribbeans reflects gross inequity to life chances and choices with overrepresentation in child welfare (Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, 2015), and high rates of incarceration (Sapers, 2013) and high school pushout (Anisef, Brown, & Sweet, 2010) that reflect the intersection of anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Black racism in Canadian society. Moreover, deported Caribbean nationals make up the majority of danger-related removals in Ontario, for which most of the offences are drug related (Barnes, 2009), reinforcing the unwritten policies of Canada’s unwanted immigrants. These overrepresentations do not support the idea of a better life.

Leaving the Caribbean for employment and a better life is one way to understand the phenomenon of Caribbean migration (Palmer, 1990), but when the context of the Caribbean is taken into account, a long history of exploitation, extortion, and marginalization can be made more visible. To look primarily at individualized experiences of migration for African Caribbeans does not address the complexity of the search for a better life nor migration as a form of resistance. This more complicated understanding of migration as resistance challenges the writing over of the colonial histories of the Caribbean. The abundance of resources in the metropolis contrasts with the poverty and high unemployment rates in the Caribbean (Bowen, 2007). However, the African Caribbean experience of the opportunities in the metropolis belies the colonial narratives of opportunities for a better life.

This gap is echoed in my recent research with African Caribbeans in Toronto, Ontario (Hackett, 2016), exploring the experiences of separation and reunification in African Caribbean immigrant families and how they rebuild their families in the context immigration and oppression in Canada. The pursuit of a better life was captured in an overarching theme of “keeping up,” which referred to the efforts and pressures to demonstrate one’s success in attaining a better life not only for one’s self but also for their family through the maintenance of relations across time and space and the redistribution of resources through, for example, remittances and barreling (sending barrels full of consumer goods to family back home). What this theme of keeping up underscored was the ways in which the pursuit of a better life was complicated by the lived experience of racism, educational, and labor market exclusion that was often experienced as individual failure but at the same time an outcome of structural racism. The migration experiences of African Caribbean families contradicted the myth of being able to uplift self and family when sending remittances back home to the Caribbean was not easy or possible or when maintaining relationships through ongoing communication (e.g., telephone calls) became untenable because of a sense of shame or personal failure in being able to help those left behind.

Positioning Colonization and Migration

There are many pathways to unraveling and examining the relationship between colonization and African Caribbean migration to Canada; Canadian historical immigration policies compel the use of a gendered lens. A closer look at the migration of African Caribbean women from the Caribbean to Canada shows the continuation of exploitation, extortion, and marginalization through the globalization of the economy. The limitations placed on African Caribbean women through Canada’s Domestic Scheme supported the extraction of labor from the Caribbean at the lowest possible price. The domestic scheme was the only way African Caribbean women from the Caribbean could access the opportunity to come to Canada in the early- and mid-1900s (Calliste, 1991). Canada’s restrictive immigration policies and practices toward people from the Caribbean functioned as if to ensure long-term profits from their labor without the long-term presence or permanence of African Caribbeans in Canada. The labor is the desired resource not the people or their families; nothing is meant to be permanent but profit. Calliste (1994) illustrates the temporariness of the status of immigrants from the Caribbean in the early decades of 1900s, pointing to the reduction in the numbers of those allowed into Canada and their subsequent deportation during times of recessions.

Implications for Social Work

Social work needs to broaden its understanding of migration by addressing the political, economic, historical, social, and cultural factors impacting the lives of African Caribbean migrants. Social work must address the legacies and impact of colonialism and slavery and the ways in which it informs social work practice, education, and policy in relation to African Caribbean migrants. Since Canada pretends not to have a history of slavery and previously denied its own colonial history, it is not surprising that Canadian social work as a reflection of Canadian social values and beliefs has ignored, minimized, or otherwise failed to account for the impact of slavery and colonialism in shaping the contemporary social, economic, and political condition faced by African Caribbean families in Canada and the subsequent and persistent impact on their life chances and choices.

Social work is often framed around supporting service users to have a chance at a better life. As social work was historically founded on working with immigrants, supporting access to a better life meant promoting assimilation, a tradition that some might argue continues. Sakamoto (2003) points to the uneven treatment of different groups of immigrants in early social work practice as social workers determined which immigrants were seen as worthy or deserving of help to achieve a better life; this analysis of social work’s history in North America helps to highlight the ways in which racism and exclusion have long been naturalized in social work practice. Racism and exclusion in present-day social work relations with African Caribbean families may be found in interactions resulting from overrepresentation in child welfare involvement (Clarke, 2011; Pon, Gosine, & Phillips, 2011), incarceration and high school pushout. Ironically, both social work and African Caribbean families in Canada could be understood as sharing a common vision of moving toward a better life, however, the rates of overrepresentation previously referred to suggest that there is a long way to go in reconciling a new relationship between social work and African Caribbean peoples.