Immigration and Integration in Canada in the Twenty-first Century (review)

The government-funded Canadian branch of the Metropolis Project—an international network of nearly 8,000 policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers engaged in migration, urban immigrant integration, and diversity issues—is the driving force behind this collection of nine essays. Intended to be the first in a series, this volume draws on research findings presented at a 2006 Vancouver conference by authors from various disciplines and governmental agencies. The purpose is to take stock of how well Canada has done in immigrant absorption and integration. The editors use the trope of a “two-way street” to explore integration, the “street” being where citizens of the host society and recent immigrants adapt to each other, with positive outcomes as the objective for both groups. Part I of the book addresses potential indicators of integration across social, political, economic, and cultural spheres, while part II points to the lack of policy coordination within and among governments. It also examines public perceptions and media depictions of immigration and integration issues. The primary target audience for the book is policy-makers and analysts. The essays are uneven, but all offer something for specialized researchers.

The editors wish to shape future discourse by developing an index of integration to determine policy efficacy so that government departments and agencies can use the resulting data sets in planning. Certainly, more resources and more actors are actively engaged in immigrant integration than ever before. Some examples proffered of empirical indicators of economic integration are poverty rates and income levels and, in the political world, voter turnout and representation in political institutions. Economic success or political representation, however, does not guarantee social cohesion. In the interrelated social and cultural spheres, levels of residential segregation, intercultural dialogue, and intermarriage and literacy rates are indicators that might be deployed, among other yardsticks.

Immigration is easy to measure; integration is less susceptible to precise reckoning because ideas about it change over time. This makes it like a moving target that has never had a single, universally accepted definition. The concept is as problematic as it is popular. Integration is often assessed by the degree to which immigrants converge to the average performance and attitudes of the native-born. There is a fine line, however, between integration and assimilation, which the editors regard as a negative. No country has a truly coherent regime for integration. Loosely connected policies, regulations, laws, and practices have rendered immigrant integration a largely spontaneous and unplanned process with many services created and delivered by NGOs. Canada is no exception, and while government touts immigration as an asset, many Canadians see it as a burden.

The editors conclude that hard empirical evidence of the success or failure of immigrant integration is still lacking. A problem that plagues most of the book’s data is that they are one-dimensional in that they do not account for immigrant intragroup diversity. The Chinese immigrant experience in Canada, for example, has been different from the Italian or Haitian experiences. The political sphere reflects this: Indo-Canadian immigrants are more likely to vote than native-born Canadians, while Chinese immigrants are much less likely to either vote or be elected. This indirectly reminds us that the immigrant pool has dramatically changed since the 1970s. Before then, it was largely British, western European, and American. Since then a growing majority of immigrants has been from developing countries, with well over three-quarters since the 1990s being members of visible minority groups.

A troubling reality overhanging the immigrant experience of the past three decades is that the older pattern of immigrant economic success has deteriorated. Paradoxically, this has happened as governments have ostensibly developed “smarter” policies to attract “smarter,” more economically qualified, better educated, and more skilled immigrants. Why has this happened? The editors point to globalization’s effects on manufacturing jobs, increased immigration from countries whose educational credentials are more likely...