Canada: A Fifth of Population is Foreign Born

Canada Real Time - WSJ

By Nirmala Menon

Reuters

Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney

Canada has long led the club of the world’s wealthiest nations in attracting immigrants, and on Wednesday it passed a big milestone—with new census data showing that more than one-fifth of Canadian residents are foreign born.

Data from Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey showed that 6.8 million Canadians, or 20.6% of the country’s total population, were foreign-born, up from 19.8% in 2006. Among G-8 nations, Canada was far ahead of second-placed Germany, where 13% of its population were immigrants, and the U.S. where the share was 12.9%.

The trend has been a slow-moving and well-documented one, but some of the reams of data released by the government Wednesday shed new light on it.

Historically, most immigrants to Canada have come from Europe. That has changed in recent years, with most newcomers now drawn from Asia. One-in-five Canadian residents are now non-Caucasian.

Of the 1.2 million immigrants who arrived in Canada between 2006 and 2011, more than half–or 56.9%–were from “Asia,” a wide geographic category the government has created that includes the Middle East. By contrast, Asian immigrants accounted for just 8.5% of the foreign-born population before the 1970s.

The biggest group of new immigrants were Filipinos, making up 13.1% of all newcomers between 2006 and 2011. Chinese came in at No. 2, at 10.5%, with India a close third at 10.4%.