In 2021, the total number of immigrants accounted for 8.3 million and the Statistics Canada added just over 1.3 million new permanent residents settled in Canada between 2016 and 2021. Over half of these recent newcomers, or some 748,120 immigrants, arrived under the economic class.
This is further going to go up as high as 34% by 2041, Statistics Canada forecasts.
Why immigration rate so high in Canada?
Immigration targets have increased over the past five years in part because of Canada’s labour shortage. Nearly a quarter of the population will age out of the workforce by 2030. The shortage is made more acute by the gradual rise in the number of deaths and the relatively low fertility levels in Canada.
In 2016, Canada had a target of 300,000 new permanent residents. In 2022, the country looks to welcome some 432,000 new immigrants by the end of the year and over 450,000 by the end of 2024. These targets are expected to remain the same or see an increase when the new Immigration Levels Plan 2023-2025 is released within the next week.
India leads the way:
One of the biggest leads that the report provided is the fact that the share of new immigrants from Asia (including the Middle East) has increased over the past 50 years.
As per the report, 62% of the new immigrants are from Asia, with 18.6% coming from India alone. This is the first time India took the top spot of Canada’s newcomers. Apart from India, the Philippines accounts for 11.4% of newcomers, followed by China at 8.9%.
Only in 1971 census, Canada had such a high percentage of immigrants from one country when 20.9% of immigrants came from the UK. In comparison to that, Europeans now account for only one in ten new immigrants.
4 other crucial leads by the latest census report:
- Nearly two-thirds of newcomers are of core working age. About 10.9% of the new immigrants that arrived to Canada between 2016 and 2021 were youth and young adults aged 15 to 24. The vast majority were core-aged workers who were between 25 to 54 years old.
- More immigrants are working in Canada compared to the pre-pandemic era. The employment rate of immigrants has increased by two percentage points since 2016.
- More recent immigrants settling outside of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Among Canada’s 41 largest urban centres, the proportion of immigrants was also above the national average of 23.0% in Calgary (31.5%), Abbotsford–Mission (26.1%), Edmonton (26.0%), Kitchener–Cambridge–Waterloo (25.8%), Hamilton (25.6%), Winnipeg (25.4%), Montréal (24.3%) and Windsor (23.3%).
- There were over 450 mother tongues reported in the 2021 census. In all, 69.4% of recent immigrants do not speak English or French as their mother tongue. Most immigrants who do not arrive in Canada speaking an official language, reported speaking Arabic (10.3%), Tagalog (8.4%), Mandarin (7.9%), and Punjabi (6.5%).
