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I was just wondering since I have heard that due to the Indian subcontinent being under British rule, and Canada being under the Commonwealth, that Canada took in more immigrants from there, such as the Sikhs of the West coast.
Indian-Americans are still a fairly young immigrant community in the US.
BIMBAM probably has more to say on this but to provide some kind of comparison with your 87% figure... it says here:
Quote:
Among Canada's two largest visible minority groups, 30.7% of South Asians and 26.7% of Chinese were born in Canada. Although both groups have a long history in Canada, immigration in recent decades has kept the proportion of foreign-born relatively high.
The same link earlier said that (East) Indians comprise 2/3rds of all South Asians. The rest are Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, etc.
I am not so sure that Canada has a much longer history of immigration from the Indian subcontinent, however. Canada had the same types of country-based immigration quotas that the US did. I am no expert on this, so I believe I am allowed to use wiki: this page says the quota system was scrapped in 1967, and Indian immigrants started arriving in much larger numbers after that.
Canada got a lot more immigration from Commonwealth countries than the US. However, when it comes to immigration from India, the US has probably caught up to Canada, due to the need for skilled tech workers.
BIMBAM probably has more to say on this but to provide some kind of comparison with your 87% figure... it says here:
The same link earlier said that (East) Indians comprise 2/3rds of all South Asians. The rest are Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, etc.
I am not so sure that Canada has a much longer history of immigration from the Indian subcontinent, however. Canada had the same types of country-based immigration quotas that the US did. I am no expert on this, so I believe I am allowed to use wiki: this page says the quota system was scrapped in 1967, and Indian immigrants started arriving in much larger numbers after that.
I can give some perspective on this, yes. There is a longer history of Indian immigration, but mostly in one specific area of Canada, the lower mainland of British Columbia. The population is mostly Sikh because the Sikhs had strong ties to the British Raj, and they began arriving around the turn of the century. The legacy of Sikh ties to the British, and therefore Canada, has certainly shaped the makeup of the Indian Canadian community as compared to the American one. In Canada, Sikhs actually outnumber Hindus by a modest degree, despite there only being twenty million or so Sikhs in India in a sea of a billion Indians of other creeds. Certainly in the United States, Sikhs are far outnumbered by Hindus. Not all of Canada's Sikhs have deep roots, but the presence of the early community lead to chain migration that continues to this day.
The next big wave of Indians to arrive was in 1947 at partition, when the Christian Goans started coming as well as the Anglo-Indians.
Certainly Commonwealth ties brought over other Indians as well. My own grandparents arrived in 1965 because Canada and India were partnered in building nuclear energy due to the Commonwealth and he arrived as a purchaser for Atomic Energy of India. Many of our family friends that they made in Canada at that time have similar stories, but to be sure the population in the east was really quite small at this time, the only temple that was even available to attend in the sixties in Montreal was the Hare Krishna temple. The community was also disproportionately highly educated, upper middle class or well off people from India in those times in the East since those were the people who could make it over.
These are the roots of the Indian community in Canada that are older than in the States, but since then we've experienced massive volumes of more recent Indian immigration, so truth be told although the history is a bit older and that has shaped things, the community isn't that much older demographically since so many have come recently. Another difference is that with the huge volumes of illegals, the US is really quite strict about legal immigration since really skilled workers who attract job offers is about all that's needed, so the community there seems a bit more educated and well off then the community here is, sort of like the earlier wave of immigrants to the east were. In Canada the bar is set a little lower and more people are allowed in, so Indians represent more of a cross section of society and aren't as associated with being well off as they are in most of the US.
No, Canada certainly does not have a longer history of Indian immigration than the US.
There were Indians present in the US colonies (16-1700's) when Canada was still a French possession, and if you dig deep enough you can even find documentation concerning them. For example, one can find descriptions of Indian runaway slaves in runaway slave advertisements of the 1700's and early 1800's. In my state of Maryland, for example, there was a law prohibiting both whites and blacks from marrying them, and they were legally to be treated as foreigners. In practice, however, Indians were treated as blacks, and subject to the same social conditions. Of course this very small minority vanished quickly, and they intermixed, legally or not, with the white and black populations. This can be evidenced in DNA tests, where it is not uncommon for blacks or whites with colonial ancestry to find that they are a small percentage "East Indian".
Just some quick examples pulled off of Wikipedia:
"For example, a Eurasian daughter born to an Indian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680 was classified as a "mulatto" and sold into slavery."
"For example, the Bengali revolutionary Tarak Nath Das's white American wife, Mary K. Das, was stripped of her American citizenship for her marriage to an "alien ineligible for citizenship."
By the time Indians began moving into Vancouver Island (later 1800's), there was already a history of Indians going back over two hundred years in the US and the colonies which became the US. IIRC the first report of an Indian in America was in the 1620's, and the man was a slave, as most Indians were. Furthermore, the phenomenon of Indians settling in British Columbia was part of a tiny wave of Indian migration which affected the west coast of both America and Canada alike. Canada's whites only policies kept out Indians (despite them belonging to the same Empire/Commonwealth). In the US there was similar hostility to Indian migration, which culminated in the early 1900's when US courts were forced to decide whether Indians were "white" or not, and thus eligible to serve in white regiments of the US army.
That being said, it must be remembered that in all of these, whether concerning the US or Canada, the number of Indians in question is very, very, very small. The only significant immigration of Indians to either country began in the 1960's; before this the presence of Indians could be described at very best as miniscule.
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