Rebecca Mancuso

Bio: Rebecca Mancuso is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Immigration policy & Immigration law. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

For Purity or Prosperity: Competing Nationalist Visions and Canadian Immigration Policy, 1919–30

Abstract: This study examines how Canada's immigration policy became the site of competing nationalist visions in the post-First World War period, when Canadians struggled with a changed sense of the nation's identity and purpose. It focuses on two groups, divided largely along gender lines: female civil servants new to Ottawa's immigration department, and Canada's leading industrialists. At the crux of the immigration debate in this period, as now, was whether cultural or economic interests should take precedence in policy. Exploring the debate in an historical context reveals immigration policy formulation to be an enterprise that responds to constantly changing social and economic systems, and relations of gender and power.

'The healthy, wholesome British domestic girl': Single female migration and the Empire Settlement Act, 1922-1930

Abstract: Female migration was an immediate priority of the Oversea Settlement Committee (OSC), the British government body dealing with Empire migration from its establishment in 1919. Before the war, the migration of single women to th edominions had been extensively assisted both by private women's migration societies and the dominion governments themselves. With the findings of the Dominions Royal Commission in 1917 underlining the importance of continued female migration, the OSC adopted an aggressive stand on the question. Under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all offered passage assistance to single British domestic servants, an occupational group much in demand in both the United Kingdom and the dominions. As part of persistent efforts to stimulate the supply of female migrants, training institutions were established in the United Kingdom from the mid-1920s at the instigation of the OSC to prepare inexperienced women for domestic service overseas. These institutions functioned to direct the women the United Kingdom most wished to see migrate towards employment in the dominions, to meet the dominion demand for domestics without threatening the United Kingdom's own supply, and as part of the process of selecting the 'right type' of migrant...