Tuesday, August 24, 2004

SPOTLIGHT: Urban immigrants

Changing the face of cities

Immigrants are changing the very face of Canada’s largest urban centres, according to a new report that paints a comprehensive statistical picture of immigrants in metropolitan areas.

Virtually all the immigrants who arrived in Canada during the 1990s – some 1.8 million people – settled in one of Canada’s 27 census metropolitan areas.

Furthermore, settlement was disproportionately located in the three largest centres: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Together, they were home for nearly three-quarters (73%) of new arrivals. In 1981, only 58% of immigrants who had arrived in the previous decade settled in these three areas.

The changing characteristics of immigrants have been central to this trend. Immigrants from East and South Asia have historically settled in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver and immigrants from these regions have accounted for an increasing share of all new arrivals in Canada.

Nevertheless, many smaller urban centres had considerable shares of their population composed of recent immigrants. For example, only about 1.3% of all recent immigrants settled in Windsor, but they represented 8.0% of its total population.

Resettlement process

Among its findings, the report showed that most immigrants settle in their intended destination in Canada and do not move from one metropolitan area to another during the resettlement process.

Furthermore, most Canadian-born children of immigrants, that is, second-generation immigrants, reside in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. This is the case even for those in their 30s and 40s.

The report also showed that immigrants have higher levels of educational attainment than people born in Canada. Yet, in virtually every urban region, a far higher proportion of recent immigrants were employed in jobs with lower skill requirements than the Canadian-born.

The report also points to potential implications of immigration for public services. For example, in all census metropolitan areas, recent immigrants aged 25 to 54 were far more likely than their Canadian-born counterparts to attend school.

In 2001, about one-quarter of all children up to the age of 17 in Toronto and Vancouver were themselves recent immigrants, or were born in Canada to parents who were recent immigrants.

Most of these children resided in households in which a language other than English or French was the main language spoken by their parents.

English or French courses

Within six months of arriving in Canada, just under one-third of new immigrants had already taken at least one course in either English or French.

In all age groups between 18 and 54, recent immigrants were more likely than people born in Canada to have attended school in the academic year 2000/01.

The high incidence of school attendance among recent immigrants, coupled with the sizeable number of recent immigrants living in many urban centres, means that this group accounts for a significant share of the student population in many such centres.

This report is the third in a series that develops statistical measures to shed light on issues of importance for Canada's cities. Statistics Canada has worked on this project in collaboration with the Cities Secretariat of the Privy Council Office.

For more information, contact Grant Schellenberg (613-951-9580), Demography Division.

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© 2004, Statistics Canada.