Immigrant integration policies when regions decide ‘who comes in’: the case of Canadian provinces

ABSTRACT

Using the Canadian case, this paper explores immigrant integration policies when Rokkan and non-Rokkan regions have immigrant selection capacities. By systematically documenting integration policies of all Canadian regions and by describing elites’ justifications for such policies between 2010 and 2018, we demonstrate that every region – including Quebec, which has a distinct language and culture – primarily focuses on economic immigrant integration. We show that regional elites justify these policies as part of their regional economic development strategies and that regional immigrant selection capacity is not considered as a cure-all solution for the contemporary challenges facing regions.

KEYWORDS:

• immigrant integration
• immigrant selection
• provinces
• Canada
• regional economic development
• immigration

JEL:

• H76
• H77
• Z

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Verena Wisthaler, Christina Isabel Zuber and Anita Manatschal for their leadership and insights, as well as the reviewers for their helpful comments. Special thanks to Samuel Proulx-Chenard for research assistance and to members of the Concordia Centre for the Study of Politics and Immigration (CSPI) for their support.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Besides economic immigration, other streams of immigration are family reunification and humanitarian immigration, including refugees.

2. In the late 1990s and until 2013, British Columbia’s and Manitoba’s immigration agreements also devolved to these provinces the implementation of federal integration services (Leo & August, 2019). The federal government cancelled these agreements unilaterally in 2013 (Fourot, 2018).

3. We expect this linkage to occur for all governments in power, notwithstanding their position on a right–left axis. Indeed, in relation to the introduction of this special issue, the presence of a left-leaning government is hard to use as an explanatory variable in the Canadian case. Indeed, within and across provinces, Canadian provincial parties cluster around a centre-right position (Elkins & Simeon, 1980). This gives little heuristic power to ideology and partisan explanations in these cases.

4. Policies supporting the political participation of immigrants are not analysed because they are rarely implemented in Canadian regions. Canadian provinces do not grant political rights. Moreover, before being naturalized, immigrants in Canada have no formal political rights (e.g., voting, running for office, etc.) despite permanent residents being granted other rights and entitlements similar to those of citizens. This is especially well captured by Canada’s relatively low score on political participation, as opposed to the country’s score on other dimensions (MIPEX, 2015). As a result, official immigrant integration policies tend to focus on linguistic, economic and cultural objectives, while political integration policies target naturalization processes and new Canadian citizens. As documented by Bloemraad (2006), however, Canadian policies that support the social, economic and linguistic do have an effect on immigrant political incorporation in Canada.

5. In each province, non-negligible efforts towards the linguistic integration of children and youth takes place in primary and secondary education institutions. These efforts are excluded from the analysis because they are reported, funded and talked about differently from adult integration by provincial governments.

6. Cultural integration policies are distinct from multicultural policies. Multiculturalism policies refer to state actions that are more right focused and have a broader target than new arrivals. These policies – embodied in instruments such as affirmative action, changes to the school curriculum or support for dual citizenship – do impact the integration of immigrants. At the same time, they operate according to their own policy dynamics. If Canadian provinces represent these policies as immigrant integration policies, our methodological approach allows us to include them in our descriptive accounts. However, a complete analysis of multicultural policies at the regional level would require a different methodology (Garcea, 2006), which in turn might not allow us to test our hypotheses.

7. While in some cases these transcripts were indexed, in other cases we conducted a computer-assisted search to identify debates about immigration, using the radical ‘migr*’.

8. Authors’ translation (Quebec Immigration, diversité et inclusion, 2018).

9. Other research has demonstrated that provinces across Canada have multiculturalism policies and at least has confirmed the absence of governmental rejection of multiculturalism in provinces outside Quebec (Garcea, 2006). Yet, as shown by our data, not all provinces fund multiculturalism programmes or present them as immigrant integration policies.

10. The period studied included two reforms of the province’s immigration act and, in general, immigration remained more discussed in this legislative assembly than in other provinces (Paquet, 2020). These contextual factors contributed to a large corpus of discourses on the linkages between immigrant selection and integration, while at the same time limiting any cross-provincial comparisons on the salience of these issues.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC) and the Concordia Research Chair on the Politics of Immigration, Concordia University.