Forced displacement and migrants' location choices: Evidence from the Japanese-Canadian experience during World War II

This paper examines whether a forced displacement of an ethnic group can lead to long-run changes to their spatial distribution and whether this shock can also lead to changes in where new migrants settle. I use the Canadian government’s internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, as well as their post-war forced resettlement, as a natural experiment. I find that the policy led to dramatic resettlement patterns; areas where Japanese Canadians were removed from had far fewer Japanese Canadians after World War II, with this effect persisting for decades. Despite these displacement patterns, I find that both the pre-war and post-war settlement patterns drive where new Japanese migrants settle within Canada, suggesting that the disruption of the connections and networks formed by Japanese migrants before World War II were not fully dismantled by the Canadian government’s wartime policies. Reinforcing this mechanism, I show using Facebook’s social connectedness data that Japanese population shares from both 1931 and 1951 predict whether a Canadian Census Division is more socially connected with Japan today. The results from this paper show that, despite Canada’s forced dispersal of its Japanese population across the country, networks and forces that connect Census Divisions to Japan and draw in new migrants continued to persist.