International Immigration is Booming in Greater Moncton
Some interesting notes from an article in the T&T today about how well Moncton anglophone schools are doing in retaining recent newcomers to the city.
- the Anglophone East School Board fully expected to lose over 1/3rd of Syrian refugees to larger cities in central Canada within the first couple of years of their arrival. Instead, the retention rate of Syrian refugee children in the anglophone school system in Moncton has been
90%.
-
18% of the school board's students are ESL (English as a second language) learners. The rate of ESL is highest in schools closer to the core of the city. Edith Cavell has more than
50% ESL.
- There is an International Welcome Centre at Queen Elizabeth School, which allows the school board to determine what it needs to do to help new international students adjust. In the last year the centre registered
650 new school applicants.
- at
453%, metro Moncton has seen the third highest rate of increase nationally (in the last five years) in new international immigrants. There are now immigrants from over 100 countries in greater Moncton.
The countries supplying the most immigrants to Anglophone School Board are:
1) - Philippines
2) - Syria
3) - China
4) - Viet Nam
5) - Nigeria
6) - South Korea
7) - Israel
8) - United States
Personal note - Diagnostic radiologists are involved in screening newcomers with chest radiography to exclude TB or other dangerous conditions. It was my turn last week to do so. I screened 24 new immigrants. I have no reason to believe that last week was an unusual one in terms of workload. If 24-25 new immigrants per week is the norm, then this works out to 1250 new immigrants to the greater Moncton area per year. I think this would jive pretty well with the Anglophone East School Board welcome centre registering 650 newcomers (children) per year.
I'm sure there are many other francophone immigrants not being accounted for in the above T&T article.