Immigration trend in reverse: Asia down, Europe up

Is the current government really receptive to new immigrants in the way they present to us?

New stats obtained by Ming Pao show an emerging, peculiar trend of immigrant landings since the Tories took office in 2006.

First of all, for at least the past 25 years, Citizenship and Immigration Canada has been very transparent in publishing immigration stats. Detailed breakdowns on numbers––such as source countries, destinations, types of immigrants, et cetera––have always been in the public domain. Even in the first year of the Tory government, under the then CIC minister Monte Solberg, stats were still as transparent.

But for the 2007 data published in summer 2008, the amount of data published on-line and ready for public scrutiny has dropped significantly. For the first time, there is no source country data. We have to go all the way to Ottawa to request for it.

Okay, back to the data.

A clear trend has developed since 2006. Asian countries such as China and India have dominated the main sources of immigrants for Canada in the past 15 years, except for a few years when some extraordinary widespread events had happened such as the financial crisis in 1996/97, 9/11 in 2001, and SARS in 2003. The trend has remained upward until 2006.

Table 2 shows us that the number of Chinese and Indian immigrants since 2006 has dropped 36.1 percent and 21.4 percent, respectively.

On the other hand, European countries that haven’t been sending us many immigrants for the past three decades suddenly saw a surge in immigrants. The number for the U.K., for example, jumped 38.6 percent between 2005 and 2007. A similar up trend can also be observed for France and the U.S. (see trend graphs below)

This is a trend that I’ve made a prediction last year, as in this post.

So is that why CIC did not publish the source country data this year? Well, we don’t know. CIC never replies to us on this question. Is this a hidden agenda? To me, it’s obvious.

Solberg used to blame it on a slower demand from China. If that is true for China only, why is the trend so consistent across all Asian countries (except the Philippines)—all of this happens in 2006 exactly? (Table 1) Plus, don’t they keep saying they have been working very hard on clearing backlogs? If they are really doing that, how could the landing figures keep shrinking?

“Note this has nothing to do with fewer people applying,” immigration lawyer Lawrence Wong interprets. “This has everything to do with reducing output at a time when they should be clearing the backlog.

“If applicants from these countries have dropped, they should not result in a reduction in the output since output relates to clearing backlog.”

Wong said: “This shows the government is not upfront about its plan to clear backlog. They brought in legislation to ”˜streamline’ future intakes but they are in fact doing less to clear existing backlog as early as 2007.”

Wong also notes the significant drops in Asian countries. “These are output figures so they support the claim that immigration [department] is cutting back on Asian immigrants.”

Again, CIC did not offer an interpretation to the data.

Susanna Ng is an editor of a Vancouver Chinese newspaper. Read more on her Chinese in Vancouver blog.