100 years of Immigration in Canada

 The displacement of peoples by wars and political upheaval;  The cycle of economic “booms and busts” in Canada and other countries;  Canada’s membership in the Commonwealth;  The growth of communication, transportation, and economic networks linking people around the world.

 First, the numbers of immigrants arriving each year have waxed and waned, meaning that the importance of immigration for Canada’s population growth has fluctuated.  Second, immigrants increasingly chose to live in Canada’s largest cities.  Third, the predominance of men among adult immigrants declined as family migration grew and women came to represent slightly over half of immigrants.

 Fourth, the marked transformation in the countries in which immigrants had been born enhanced the ethnic diversity of Canadian society.  Fifth, alongside Canada’s transition from an agricultural to a knowledge-based economy, immigrants were increasingly employed in the manufacturing and service sectors of the economy.

 Immigration: the movement of people into a country for purposes of legal settlement.  Net migration: the difference between immigration and emigration (the flow of people leaving the country permanently).  Immigrants/foreign-born: principally people who are, or have been, landed immigrants in Canada.  A landed immigrant is a person who has been granted the right to live in Canada permanently by immigration authorities. Some are recent arrivals; others have resided in Canada for many years.

 Non-permanent residents: people from another country who live in Canada and have work, student, or Minister’s permits, or claim refugee status. They are not included in the immigrant population after 1986, except in growth projections.  Visible minority population: the Employment Equity Act defines visible minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.” The visible minority population includes the following groups: Blacks, South Asians, Chinese Koreans, Japanese, Southeast Asians, Filipinos, Arabs and West Asians, Latin Americans and Pacific Islanders.

 Refugee: according to the 1951 United Nations Convention on refugees, a refugee is a person who “…owing to well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…” As a signatory to this convention, Canada uses the UN definition of a refugee in assessing who is eligible to enter Canada as a refugee.