Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities (original) (raw)
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Size Matters: Attracting New Immigrants to Canadian Cities
and Vancouver have attracted most new immigrants to Canada. Small and medium-sized cities in Canada are keen to share the wealth that new immigrants represent, and federal and provincial governments support a more even distribution of settlement. As a result, the idea of attracting new immigrants to smaller locations is a pressingpolicy issue. This research weighs the characteristics of place that new immigrants consider on arrival. It uses findings from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (Statistics Canada, 2003) to construct an index that ranks five medium-sized cities in British Columbia in terms of their potential attractiveness to new immigrants. The index created proves robust and reliable from a statistical viewpoint. The study confirms that immigrants are attracted to cities where friends and family or other immigrants live. Moreover, the increase in attractiveness of a city is primarily related to its size. The index is an indicator of the role that population and the extant number of immigrants in situ plays in determining the appeal of smaller cities. From a policy perspective, if governments wish to "spread the wealth" associated with immigration and an expanded labour force, a proactive policy stance that enumerates and communicates the appeal of less prominent communities is vital. This is an important finding, and we offer policy options that account for the relationship of population size to immigrant retention. La grande majoritd des immigrants au Canada s'dtablissent h MontrdaL ~ Toronto ou ?l Vancouver. D' une part, Ies petites villes et celles de taille moyenne tiennent ?~ partager les richesses ddcoulant de l'arrivde d'immigrants; d'autre part, les gouvernements fdddral et provinciaux appuient une rdpartition plus dgale des nouveaux immigrants. En consdquence, l'idde d' attirer les nouveaux immigrants vers de plus petits centres s" av~re une question stratdgique urgente. Cette recherche examine les
Invisible migrants : the case of Russians in Montreal
2010
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The New Local Governance of Immigration in Canada: Regulation and Responsibility
2011
In 2010, the Government of Canada significantly cut settlement service funding that helps immigrants integrate into Canadian communities. Concurrently, within the last three years, Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration have funded forty-five Local Immigration Partnerships across the Province of Ontario. Local Immigration Partnerships serve to coordinate efforts and capture capacity within communities to attract and retain new immigrants; however, these Partnerships do not deliver services to immigrants living in the host community. While community-based endeavours to develop sustainable environments for immigrants to live, work and play in are valuable, this particular shift in responsibility from government to community groups and individuals cannot go unnoticed. It is this new local governance of immigration in Canada that will be the focus of this Master's essay. Hence, when it comes to governing human beings, to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed.-Nikolas Rose 1
immigrant and settlement service sector, and private industries seeking to attract immigrant talent and acquire best practices related to diversity-as well as encouraging and supporting students in their pursuit of grassroots activism. These two core features of ISS-academic excellence and practical relevance-provide the context for The Promise of Migration. This compendium to the Conference is intended to promote students' work in the wider field of migration and, most importantly, to foster the participation of graduate students who bring their own perspective to the International Metropolis Conference in Canada. Students are tomorrow's leaders and their ideas and perspectives will shape the future of newcomer inclusion, economic opportunity harnessed from migration, and corresponding global cooperation. Ultimately, their ideas and perspectives will help migrants and societies to achieve the most from the promise of migration. All chapters were co-written by recent graduates of ISS (who are listed as first authors) and their faculty supervisors (second authors). The chapters are based on the students' Major Research Papers (MRPs). The instruction given to participating students and supervisors was to make the text accessible to a variety of audiences, including academics, policy makers, and civic leaders. The contributors were encouraged to discuss the policy relevance of their research, include policy recommendations, and avoid academic jargon. Readers who are interested in further details can access the full MRPs free of charge through Ryerson University, where we keep the remarkable collection of every MRP written by ISS graduates since 2005. The twelve chapters of this compendium are organized into four parts, each containing three chapters. Part 1 addresses issues related to the 'settlement sector,' which is a particularly Canadian term that refers to structures and organizations that deliver services to newcomers, ranging from immediate assistance at arrival and adapting in a new environment, to language training and career development. Part 2 deals with policy and innovative policy directions-in particular, in relation to settlement policies and immigrant selection programs in Canada. Part 3 focuses on identity and the roles of religion and practices of racialization on processes of 'integration.' Finally, Part 4 discusses international and transnational perspectives that link Canada to other parts of the world.
2022
This report looks at migrants' access to housing, employment, and other relevant resources in six different small and medium-sized towns and rural areas in Canada between 2016 and 2021. Primarily based on interviews conducted in each of the six selected municipalities, secondary data analysis and a policy literature review, it provides an overview of the concrete barriers that migrants face in relation to housing and employment; the local actors who are involved in, and/or seen as responsible for, facilitating their access; any concrete local measures or practices that help or hinder this access; and the specific target groups of these measures, initiatives or practices. The report finds that the concrete barriers facing migrant access to housing are affordability, availability, and size. These factors were particularly acute in Ontario and B.C. where a housing crisis has driven up the average cost of a home and decreased availability. During the study period, Canada possessed low unemployment rates, however, one of the concrete barriers regarding economic integration was foreign credential recognition and language acquisition (English or French). The local actors who were involved included immigrant settlement service organizations, provincial employment ministries, faith organizations or groups of individuals (involved in private sponsorship), provincial/regional chambers of commerce and community service organizations. The measures and practices included employment matching and preparation services, language training programs, job banks, mentoring programs, paid internships, targeted migrant hiring initiatives by municipal and community-service organizations, skills upgrading programs and municipal integration policies. The specific target groups of these measures included immigrants (both economic and resettled refugees) as well as residents.
City of Toronto's Role in Immigration and Settlement
This report examines the role of the City of Toronto in immigration policy and settlement and integration programming. Toronto continues to be the most significant centre in Canada for newcomer settlement and a leading factor behind the rapid population growth of this global city (the fourth largest centre on in North America). Fully 35.9% of the total immigrant population in Canada call Toronto home and the city continues to be a powerful magnet for secondary migration. 46.1% of the city’s population, based on the 2016 Census, is made up foreign-born residents (Praznik and Shields, 2018, p. 4). Toronto is truly a ‘world a city’ (Anisef and Lanfphier, 2003) and is profoundly shaped by the impact of mass migration and the immigrant experience.
Analytic Introduction: The Unique Features of Canadian Small Centres
Canadian Ethnic Studies , 2024
The integration of migrants is a perennial theme of social science, from Töennies and Weber debating about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft to Park and Burgess' assimilation theory to Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc's (1994) transnationalism to contemporary debates about the possibilities and limits of integration and shared citizenship (Maas 2021). Analyzing integration elucidates not only local community membership dynamics but also the complex processes underlying the construction of the nation-state and nationalism, policy enactment and deployment, and how individual/group identity formation and mobilization interacts with these processes. Existing literature tends to focus overwhelmingly on large urban centres, overlooking the unique social processes that occur in small and medium-sized towns and rural centres. This special issue brings together Canadian social science researchers working on different facets of migrant integration in smaller centres in Canada. It includes theoretical contributions that theorize the unique dynamics of inclusion in smaller centres, empirical case studies of specific towns or rural areas or diasporic communities in Canada, and analyses of municipal, regional, provincial, or national policies promoting integration and their interplay with local community formation. Both permanent and temporary forms of migration to Canada are discussed and a diversity of methodological approaches-both quantitative and qualitative-guide the inquiries. The articles included this issue understand migrant integration not just as formal policy but as a complex process involving a diversity of political, economic, and social actors (Almustafa, Barber and Maas 2022; Barber, Almustafa and Maas 2022; Caponio and Pettrachin 2023). As a result, the themes surveyed include both formal and informal facets of the integration experience such as public attitudes towards migrants, labour market integration, access to housing and the role of social activities
Relations industrielles, 2010
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Conceptualizing Migrant Integration in Canadian Small Centres
As populations in small and medium-sized Canadian communities steadily decline, migration is increasingly seen as the solution. While government programs promoting migration to smaller centres exist at both the federal and provincial levels, the long-term integration of newcomers to smaller communities remains a challenge. This tendency could be connected to the notable social, economic and political differences that have been described between larger and smaller centres which can be overlooked by theories of integration derived from empirical work conducted in larger, heavily urban centres. This article explores three theories of integration-assimilation, transnationalism and the whole-of-community approach-and their applicability to the study of small centres medium-sized centres. It suggests that the whole-of-community's emphasis on local context, multilevel governance and dynamic view of culture provides a useful framework for theorizing integration in small centres and develops a sketch of factors relevant to their study in the Canadian context.