From The Hindu, April 14, 1975: Anti-Indian incidents in Canada

New York, April 13: The steady arrival of immigrants from India is causing tension and touching off violent incidents in parts of Canada.

A report from Vancouver in the New York Times yesterday said the influx from India “has exposed a vein of prejudice, bringing new problems, and even a bit of violence to Vancouver’s streets.” The Times carried a news feature displaying the photograph of a Sikh family peering through a glass window broken by vandals. According to the report, “the anti-Indian incidents — schoolyard taunts and fistfights, window-breaking in the night and attacks with paint — reflect new feelings that have become part of an agonising national debate now under way about whether, and how, to change Canada’s entrance requirements which are among the most liberal in the world.”

To help in drawing up new legislation making it harder for foreigners to get in, the Canadian Government has asked the people for suggestions, encouraging a public discussion. However, there are reports that the Canadian Government has already decided in principle to limit the number of immigrants, especially from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

According to the Times report, immigrants from India, who in the 1950s numbered only a few hundreds a year, now constitute the fourth largest group in the immigration statistics — after people from Britain, the United States, and Portugal. In 1974, there were 14,000 immigrants, an increase of 150 per cent over 1972, and many of them attracted by friends and relatives from home, moved into southeast Vancouver, a middle-class neighbourhood that was, like most of Canada, almost entirely white.