Cities and Immigrants

A century ago, in 1913, over 400,000 immigrants arrived in Canada—one immigrant for every sixteen residents in the country. In 2012, as in the other years in the past decade, the immigrant influx will be about 250,000 or approximately two-thirds of one percent of the national population. Recent immigrants attract attention because they are overwhelmingly “visible” and officialdom defines them as such. In their own way, the immigrants of a century ago were “visible” as well—foreign dress, customs, languages, and diets communicated their visibility. During the Depression, some cities had immigrants who were receiving welfare payments deported. Today’s immigrants arrive in a context of public policies designed to aid them. The policy motive for the massive inflow in the early part of the last century was rural settlement in the West; well into the 1920s, the Canadian Pacific Railway aggressively lobbied Ottawa to admit more immigrants from the “non-preferred” countries of central and eastern Europe because over thirty million acres of vacant land were within fifteen miles of the CPR’s rail network, making the railway less viable than it might otherwise have been. Some immigrants in this turn-of-the twentieth century wave also headed for eastern Canadian cities to labour in their then-burgeoning manufacturing sector.

Since then, rural agricultural Canada has steadily declined and manufacturing has been on a downward slope for decades. Today’s immigrants settle overwhelmingly in cities and their suburbs. These newcomers labour disproportionately in the economy’s service, or tertiary, sector, while there are few in the primary sector—farming, fishing, logging, and mining. The visible minorities on Canada’s farms tend to be temporary, seasonally-employed foreigners. The principle motive driving immigration policy today continues to be economic, but the rationale is different: a younger cohort of Canadians is now required to pay the taxes sustaining social programs for an aging population in its retirement and declining health.

Immigrants gravitate to the largest conurbations—greater Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal are now home to one of every three Canadians—because they have existing ethnic and family networks for many of the recently arrived. Most immigrants also perceive large cities as offering the best prospects for employment and for escalation on the socio-economic ladder. A challenge for smaller centres is recruiting and retaining immigrants, something to which senior levels of government have become more responsive in the past decade. The technical and educational backgrounds of immigrants have also changed over the past century. Immigration policy now rewards literacy, skills qualifications, and proficiency in one of two official languages. Once, these mattered much less or not at all. And, where Britons and Americans and then Europeans were once given preference in admission policy, they must now get in the queue with the others.

The three books reviewed here juxtapose urban and immigrant policy considerations in the context of Canada’s ethnocultural and ethno-racial diversity. All three books address the management of the social changes wrought by multiculturalism. As a monograph, Kristin Good’s Municipalities and Multiculturalism offers one big story; the other two books, as edited collections, tell smaller stories that revolve around two related themes: one book dissects sub-national, primarily provincial and municipal immigrant settlement policies in Canada; the other explores the management of ethno-cultural diversity in a broader international and cross-disciplinary context. The first of the edited books is in a Fields of Governance Series and is the product of a project entitled Multilevel Governance and Public Policy in Canadian Municipalities. The second, whose series editor is at Utrecht University, appears under the aegis of the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations.

Robert...