Canada: EXTERNAL AFFAIRS: Southward Trek

Everybody seemed to want a U.S. visa. In 14 U.S. consulates, from Halifax to Vancouver, hard-pressed clerks interviewed Canadians, laboriously filled out long forms, took fingerprints of prospective new Americans. Last week consular officials paused to look at the record. In the last six months of 1945 they had okayed permanent visas for 8,767 Canadians, turned down thousands of others. If the present pressure continued, 20,000 Canadians will migrate to the U.S. in the 1945-46 fiscal year. Not since 1931 had so many Canadians pulled up stakes and moved south.

Officials did not have far to look for the reasons behind the increased emigration: 1) relaxation of the wartime Canadian law requiring a labor permit to leave the country; 2) easing of exchange restrictions on taking money out of Canada; 3) increased urban unemployment in the Dominion; 4) continuation of rigid Dominion wage controls, and higher prevailing pay scales south of the border.

What worried Canadian authorities most was the sharp increase in the number of visas issued to top-class citizens. Visas for professional, clerical and other white-collar categories had shown the biggest rise of any group, 2,232 issued in the last six months of 1945, compared with 1,770 in the year 1944-45.

For Canada this posed a major problem. The Dominion had lost one-sixth of her population to the U.S. before 1930. Stringent immigration and wartime controls had helped dry up that stream. Now the stream was rising again.