Author: Riley Donavan, Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Canada champions diversity, yet more than a quarter of its new permanent residents come from a single country.
In 2022, 27 per cent of permanent resident admissions came from India. The second top source, China, accounted for a significantly lower 7.2 per cent. The next three on the list — Afghanistan, Nigeria and the Philippines — all hovered at around five per cent each. Canada admitted nearly 438,000 permanent residents that year, including more than 118,000 from India.
That is not diversity. It is concentration.
Statistics Canada reported in 2022 that India accounted for 18.6 per cent of recent immigrants from 2016 to 2021, noting that “the last time that such a high proportion of immigrants came from a single place of birth was in the 1971 Census, when 20.9 per cent of all recent immigrants came from the United Kingdom.”
Today, India dominates permanent resident admissions. Yesterday, it was China.
At the peak of Chinese immigration into Canada in 2005, no fewer than 16.1 per cent of permanent resident admissions came from China, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Four years later, in 2009, China still accounted for 11.5 per cent of new permanent residents, up from 2 per cent in the late 1980s.
The heavy concentration of admissions from China and India has fuelled the growth of major Chinese and Indian diasporas and the formation of several major enclaves.
According to Statistics Canada, South Asians account for 52 per cent of the population of Brampton, the third-largest city in Ontario, and 38 per cent of Surrey, B.C.’s fastest-growing city. Brampton and Surrey have developed enclaves in which residents can live, work and obtain services within their own linguistic and cultural communities.
A Globe and Mail piece published in 2016 by a South Asian Muslim resident of Brampton notes that Canadian Tire staff automatically speak to her in Punjabi and says that “Sometimes, I wonder if I live in India or Canada.” A local bus driver was showcased in a CBC news spot for learning Punjabi to communicate with riders. The Government of Ontario is funding the construction of the province’s first “Sikh-Punjabi” long-term care home in Brampton.
Statistics Canada data indicates that 54.3 per cent of Richmond, B.C., is Chinese, along with 47.9 per cent of Markham, Ontario.
A recent documentary by journalist Harrison Faulkner examines the cultural isolation of Markham, including shopping plazas with shop signs written only in Chinese. A prohibition of Chinese-only signs has been proposed repeatedly in Richmond, with the local government ultimately allowing the practice to continue.
Enclaves also facilitate the importation of foreign conflicts.
Canada has become a hotbed of Khalistani activism, a movement advocating the secession of the majority-Sikh state of Punjab from India.
In June 2023, Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was assassinated outside a Surrey gurdwara. Symbolic Khalistan referendums have even been held, with strong participation from the Indian diaspora.
In 2022, organizers claimed a Brampton referendum drew 110,000 voters. The following year, a referendum held in Surrey saw 100,000 votes cast, according to organizers.
Will these ethnic enclaves disperse over time? Perhaps not.
The validity of “spatial assimilation,” the longstanding sociological theory positing that enclaves function as reception centres that immigrants eventually leave as they become wealthier and more acculturated, is coming under fire in academia.
A 2024 analysis of Canada’s immigration landscape in the Migration Policy Institute explains that “some immigrant groups maintain their enclaves for far longer than what spatial assimilation theory would suggest, even though they ostensibly have the resources to leave.” A 2022 study published in International Migration Review found that in Norway, “spatial assimilation is slow despite rapid socioeconomic progress across immigrant generations.”
If enclaves can persist despite rising incomes and socioeconomic progress, Canada cannot simply assume that assimilation will eventually disperse them.
While it is likely not possible to entirely prevent the formation of enclaves, their growth can be limited by restricting how much of Canada’s immigration comes from any single country. A straightforward way to do that is a universal per-country cap limiting any one country to a set percentage of annual admissions.
The U.S. has had a country cap for more than three decades. Under U.S. law, people from any single country generally cannot receive more than 7 per cent of the combined annual family-sponsored and employment-based preference visas; immediate relatives of American citizens fall outside the limit.
The longstanding U.S. cap shows that such a policy is hardly unusual for a Western democracy.
While taking inspiration from the U.S. approach, we should strengthen its reach by extending the cap to cover all permanent resident admissions without exception.
Without a cap, the dominance of Canada’s immigration admissions by China and India may continue, entrenching or growing existing enclaves. Other high-population source countries could also take the lead in the future, creating entirely new large enclaves in Canada.
Further fragmentation of Canadian national identity can be limited with a country cap, which would reduce the growth of large enclaves and encourage the successful assimilation of immigrants.
Riley Donovan is a freelance journalist and the editor of Dominion Review. He writes for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.