Most geographically concentrated ethnic groups

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Docere

If you have a university account or access to a public library, you can run access the Census Analyser and run a PUMF file.

This data is only available for 2011, but I see no reason to believe the proportions would have changed dramatically.

Nationwide, 86% of those of "Caribbean origins" are Black, as are 61% of those claiming "African origins." With North African and South African excluded from the African group for example, surely the percentage is higher. I can say with confidence that the majority in both the Caribbean and Subsaharan African groups are Black.

That surprises me. I wonder if South Asians from the Caribbean are less likely to identify themselves as "Caribbeans"?

[Docere]

StatsCan does have some data here from 2011. Only the leading 100 ethnic responses are included:

% Black:

Jamaican 90.3%
Haitian 95.3%
Trinidadian/Tobagonian 51.1%
Somali 92%
Barbadian 78.5%
Nigerian 97.5%
Ethiopian 92.3%
Ghanaian 94%

Kenyan and Ugandan doesn't make the top 100 responses. Only 7% of those declaring South African are Black (there are far more Jewish South Africans than Black South Africans in Canada). 27% of Guyanese are Black, they're not classified in the Caribbean group and are thus excluded.

ETA: I did include Sudanese, since most Sudanese in Canada are from South Sudan.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

That surprises me. I wonder if South Asians from the Caribbean are less likely to identify themselves as "Caribbeans"?

I am not surprised. South Asians in the Caribbean are massively concentrated in Trinidad-and-Tobago. Canada has lots of people from that country of course but when you consider there are about 500,000 people of South Asian origin in that specific country, the number who have migrated to Canada can't help but pale in comparison to the number of Jamaicans, Haitians and people from the other islands that live in Canada.

And of course I don't count Guyana and Surinam as "Caribbean". Maybe some people do.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I am not surprised. South Asians in the Caribbean are massively concentrated in Trinidad-and-Tobago. Canada has lots of people from that country of course but when you consider there are about 500,000 people of South Asian origin in that specific country, the number who have migrated to Canada can't help but pale in comparison to the number of Jamaicans, Haitians and people from the other islands that live in Canada.

And of course I don't count Guyana and Surinam as "Caribbean". Maybe some people do.

I definitely consider Guyana to be a Caribbean country. Heck, the CARICOM Secretariat has its HQ in Georgetown. Although I guess if the definition is purely geographic ....

[Docere]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

I definitely consider Guyana to be a Caribbean country. Heck, the CARICOM Secretariat has its HQ in Georgetown. Although I guess if the definition is purely geographic ....

Culturally it is basically a Caribbean country.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Docere

Culturally it is basically a Caribbean country.

But so are northern coastal parts of Colombia, no?

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

Black population

Ontario 627,715
Quebec 319,230
Alberta 129,395
BC 43,500
Manitoba 30,335
Nova Scotia 21,915

Caribbean (excluding Hispanic groups)

Ontario 437,430
Quebec 179,715
Alberta 32,555
BC 22,380
Manitoba 10,110
Nova Scotia 4,520

Subsaharan African (excluding South African)

Ontario 203,300
Quebec 114,975
Alberta 89,850
BC 21,325
Manitoba 19,450
Nova Scotia 2,775

Interesting that Alberta has the highest ratio of African to Caribbean roots among these. Ontario, as I'd imagined, has the highest ratio of Caribbean to African.

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

I definitely consider Guyana to be a Caribbean country. Heck, the CARICOM Secretariat has its HQ in Georgetown. Although I guess if the definition is purely geographic ....

Originally Posted by Docere

Culturally it is basically a Caribbean country.

It's culturally tied to the Anglophone Caribbean or West Indies countries like nearby Trinidad and Tobago (both Trinidad and Tobago and the Guianas -- like Suriname, Guyana etc. are also pretty distinctive among New World countries in having a large population descended from East Indian and other Asian laborers in the 1800s, compared to others).

Some views of what the Caribbean is using a very narrow geographical definition involves only the islands in and ringing the Caribbean sea. Some people will include additional places nearby eastern Central America like Costa Rica or Panama, as well as the coasts of northern South American countries. Also, the islands that are either directly lying outside from or farther away from the Caribbean sea proper, the Bahamas and Bermuda, are usually, or often included in the Caribbean too.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Interesting that Alberta has the highest ratio of African to Caribbean roots among these. Ontario, as I'd imagined, has the highest ratio of Caribbean to African.
o.

Most of its black population is of more recent arrival I suppose. Just like most of its "visible minority" population.

As a recently as 20 years ago, I'd estimate that the black population in Ontario and Quebec was massively Caribbean in origin.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Most of its black population is of more recent arrival I suppose. Just like most of its "visible minority" population.

As a recently as 20 years ago, I'd estimate that the black population in Ontario and Quebec was massively Caribbean in origin.

So generally, higher % of African relative to Caribbean roughly corresponds with how late, versus early the time periods the black population immigrated in (earlier still would be a large African American/Black Canadian-descended proportion but as mentioned before that data is hard to come by) was.

I'm guessing the relative trend is that the Caribbean immigration likely already peaked, probably before the end of the 20th century, but that African immigration is still continuing to rise. Then again, you still do hear about Caribbean immigration especially about Haiti now in the news, so I'm wondering if it's likely that Caribbean immigration from Anglophone countries like Jamaica peaked quite some years earlier than Francophone Caribbean (mostly Haitian) immigration.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

So generally, higher % of African relative to Caribbean roughly corresponds with how late, versus early the time periods the black population immigrated in (earlier still would be a large African American/Black Canadian-descended proportion but as mentioned before that data is hard to come by) was.

I'm guessing the relative trend is that the Caribbean immigration likely already peaked, probably before the end of the 20th century, but that African immigration is still continuing to rise. Then again, you still do hear about Caribbean immigration especially about Haiti now in the news, so I'm wondering if it's likely that Caribbean immigration from Anglophone countries like Jamaica peaked quite some years earlier than Francophone Caribbean (mostly Haitian) immigration.

I don't have any stats but that's my sense. Haitians are still arriving in Quebec and people from the Anglo-Caribbean are still moving to Ontario, but it's the sub-Saharan African population that is visibly increasing in both provinces IMO. Maybe it's because the sub-Saharan Africans weren't that numerous before that they now stand out so much?

By my estimation I think the majority of blacks in places like Gatineau and Quebec City are probably already sub-Saharan African. These two cities do have Haitians as well, but not as big a historic concentration as Montreal.

If I just think of black people with a high public profile in Quebec (celebrities, politicians, athletes, etc.), it's about equal at this point between Haitians and sub-Saharan Africans. That's a huge change over just a couple of decades ago.

By that same standard, in Ontario, Jamaicans (or maybe Anglo-Caribbeans) still seem pretty dominant.

[Docere]

My guess is there's about a 2-1 ratio of Caribbean to African origin among Blacks in the GTA.

Jamaicans dominate the Black Caribbean population, with Trinis a distant second. No nationality dominates the Black African population and seems pretty evenly split between West and East Africans.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I don't have any stats but that's my sense. Haitians are still arriving in Quebec and people from the Anglo-Caribbean are still moving to Ontario, but it's the sub-Saharan African population that is visibly increasing in both provinces IMO. Maybe it's because the sub-Saharan Africans weren't that numerous before that they now stand out so much?

By my estimation I think the majority of blacks in places like Gatineau and Quebec City are probably already sub-Saharan African. These two cities do have Haitians as well, but not as big a historic concentration as Montreal.

If I just think of black people with a high public profile in Quebec (celebrities, politicians, athletes, etc.), it's about equal at this point between Haitians and sub-Saharan Africans. That's a huge change over just a couple of decades ago.

By that same standard, in Ontario, Jamaicans (or maybe Anglo-Caribbeans) still seem pretty dominant.

There's no doubt that Caribbean influence is pretty strong if not dominant in Ontario and Quebec's black communities. I'm guessing they're still arriving as immigrants, but my thought as to why the immigration wave probably peaked from the Caribbean (at least maybe somewhere like Ontario) was that I read some stat a while back that in the GTA, there recently passed a mark where more Canadian than Caribbean-born black youth lived there.

When a group has a higher percentage of Canadian-born, than foreign-born members, I'm thinking it's likely that the immigration wave probably reached some peak and is falling (of course it also depends on things like fertility rate of the native/foreign born, return migration etc., and the possibility of a future wave of people arriving from the same place causing another, higher peak).


"Until 2011, young Black adults living in GTA were much more likely to be born in the Caribbean than in Canada, but the trend has reversed. Black youth today are twice as likely to be born in Canada than in the Caribbean, while those from Africa have been on the rise."

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/immigra...dentities.html

[Docere]

According to the study, 55% are of Caribbean origin, 31% African origin and 4% both.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Acajack

By my estimation I think the majority of blacks in places like Gatineau and Quebec City are probably already sub-Saharan African. These two cities do have Haitians as well, but not as big a historic concentration as Montreal.

I've always wondered why Quebec city, for the second largest city in Quebec has relatively few recent immigrants (be they from France, or Francophone countries) for a city of it's size.

I mean, I understand why Montreal being the bigger city would obviously be a large draw, just like Toronto draws all the Ontario-bound immigrants, but the size of Quebec city, over a half million with a metro of 800, 000, would normally draw a lot of immigrants if it was a city of that size elsewhere in Canada. Even Gatineau, being smaller seems to have more (Francophone) immigrants though to be fair being part of a metro area shared with Ottawa helps.

[Docere]

Black African immigration to Canada is very recent, not really significant until the 1990s. Before that the majority of immigrants from Subsaharan Africa were non-Black (i.e. white South Africans, Ugandan Asians in the 70s etc.)

[FrAnKs]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

I've always wondered why Quebec city, for the second largest city in Quebec has relatively few recent immigrants (be they from France, or Francophone countries) for a city of it's size.

I mean, I understand why Montreal being the bigger city would obviously be a large draw, just like Toronto draws all the Ontario-bound immigrants, but the size of Quebec city, over a half million with a metro of 800, 000, would normally draw a lot of immigrants if it was a city of that size elsewhere in Canada. Even Gatineau, being smaller seems to have more (Francophone) immigrants though to be fair being part of a metro area shared with Ottawa helps.

I know, but it has improved alot earlier. In just a decade, we've doubled our number of Immigrants living in the metro area. For an over 400 years old city, I think that's noteworthy. Now, let's just continue to work that way.

[Docere]

Edmonton now has the 4th largest Black population in Canada (58,000), with nearly twice as many Blacks as the country's third largest metro area, Vancouver (30,000). Calgary (54,000) is close behind. In both cities, a majority are of African immigrant origin.

So while the Black presence has been less visible in the West than in the East, Van's Black presence is rather small even by Western Canadian standards.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

Edmonton now has the 4th largest Black population in Canada (58,000), with nearly twice as many Blacks as the country's third largest metro area, Vancouver (30,000). Calgary (54,000) is close behind. In both cities, a majority are of African immigrant origin.

So while the Black presence has been less visible in the West than in the East, Van's Black presence is rather small even by Western Canadian standards.

Are Western Canadian black communities dominated by very recent African immigrants generally preceded by or overlapped with a pre-existing Caribbean or African-American/Black Canadian community the way eastern ones were? I know for instance that Vancouver had an African American community at some point (and that's why Jimi Hendrix had a connection to the city), and there were occasionally small black community settlements out in the Canadian west, but I presume they were small enough and early enough that many might not have lasted long enough to meet up or overlap with the late 20th century wave of immigrants.

So, did many African immigrants' communities in the Albertan cities or other western cities basically "start" out as the first major black communities/neighborhoods that their city saw?

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

Unspecified African or Black was also excluded since it's not easy to tell whether they're immigrant or "native" Blacks.

Is it easy to tell anyways how quickly second-generation or later descendants of immigrants who identify as Black "lose" their specific ethnic/national-origin self-labelled identity? Some surveys and interviews suggest that kids who grow up black in North America just come to see themselves as black, not Jamaican or Nigerian etc. If there are people with immigrant-origin parents who then self-identify as "Black Canadian" the next generation the way African American identity is taken up in the US, then "Black Canadian" as an identity will start to grow, and national-origin identity will decline, as kids and grand-kids get farther from the immigrant experience.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Is it easy to tell anyways how quickly second-generation or later descendants of immigrants who identify as Black "lose" their specific ethnic/national-origin self-labelled identity? Some surveys and interviews suggest that kids who grow up black in North America just come to see themselves as black, not Jamaican or Nigerian etc. If there are people with immigrant-origin parents who then self-identify as "Black Canadian" the next generation the way African American identity is taken up in the US, then "Black Canadian" as an identity will start to grow, and national-origin identity will decline, as kids and grand-kids get farther from the immigrant experience.

It's possible too that one might write "Black" or "African" along with say "Trinidadian."