Earning their support: feelings towards Canada among recent immigrants

Abstract

This article examines the factors that lie behind Canada's success at earning the support of its newcomers. It examines the extent to which feelings towards Canada are grounded in immigrants' experiences in the host country, predispositions inherited from their lives prior to migration, and their comparative assessments of the host country and the country of origin. The findings indicate that although feelings towards Canada are partly shaped by post-migration factors, immigrants also interpret experiences in their new host country through the lens of their pre-migration experiences.

Keywords:

• immigration
• political
• Canada
• attitudes
• integration
• opinion

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible through funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. Because our data include multiple observations clustered within different countries of origin, the standard OLS assumption of independent errors is violated with respect to our contextual variables (GDP and Freedom House scores). Standard errors in our regression model are corrected to take this clustering into account.

2. Tests using the original measure of orientations towards Canada as the dependent variable in OLS regression indicated that the residual errors were non-normal. The original 1–10 scale has been transformed to a logarithmic scale with base 10. The formula is: y_t = −log₁₀ (−y_o + 11) + 1, where y_o is the original 1–10 scale, and y_t is the transformed scale. Subsequent tests of skewness and kurtosis indicated that this measure does not violate the assumption of normally distributed residual errors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen White

STEPHEN WHITE is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University.

Antoine Bilodeau

ANTOINE BILODEAU is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University.

Neil Nevitte

NEIL NEVITTE is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.