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“THE NEw MECCA OF IMMIGRANTS”...
Hungary and Galicia.”® Such a shift in attitude, brought about the reversal
of former measures barring immigration: in 1923 the regulation restricting
the entry of immigrants from Germany and her wartime allies was repealed,
in 1925 the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian National Railways were
authorized to recruit European agriculturalists, even from previously non¬
preferred countries. Thus the status of Hungary changed and it was treated in
the same way as countries in Western Europe.‘
In line with these measures, a major wave of Hungarian immigration to
Canada at the very time the United States effectively closed its gates with
the introduction of quotas. After 1923, the only Hungarians who could enter
were those who had enough money to buy land and agricultural workers who
already had a guarantee of employment. They also had to be in a good physical
and mental condition, be literate, to have a valid passport and possess a train
ticket to their final destination (to prevent them ending up in bigger cities).
Some Hungarians sold all their property to emigrate to Canada in the hope of
a better future. Dreisziger argues that it is difficult to state the precise number
of Hungarians arriving at this time as people also came from countries that
were no longer part of Hungary, as well as from the United States, and those
coming from Hungary were not always of Magyar ethnicity.** We have no
precise data either about the number of people who returned to Hungary or
moved to the United States (either legally or illegally). Based on data from the
Department of Immigration and Colonization quoted by Dreisziger, we may
estimate the number of Hungarians who immigrated to the country at around
30,000. This is, of course, low compared to the peak period of immigration to
the United States, but it is high relative to Hungarian immigration to Canada
in the previous decades. In addition, the new wave of immigrants also provided
a boost to the cultural and social life of Canadian Hungarian communities.
The increase, however, was short lived and large-scale immigration to the
country could not continue in the 1930s due to the Great Depression. The
economic crisis itself, and the strict measures taken in the wake of it, practically
ended mass immigration: while between 1921 and 1931 1,166,000 people
immigrated to the country, between 1931 and 1941 this number dropped to a
mere 140,000, with only a few Hungarians among them. ‘The story of Andras
Takacs and his family fits nicely into this historical context. Andras was a young
agriculturalist from a village in one of the poorer regions of the mother country
who decided to leave Hungary after the devastation of the Great War in search
of better opportunities. Although far from official political life, the decisions
in Washington and Ottawa greatly influenced his migration trajectory since
the quotas prevented him from emigrating to the United States. He decided
2 Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates, 141.
33° Tbid., 141.
34 This paragraph is based on: Dreisziger, Struggle and Hope, 97-103.
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