Metro's mosaic
Forty per cent of region's residents born elsewhere, census reveals
VANCOUVER - Metro Vancouver is now more multicultural than Miami, Los Angeles or New York City. And it's multicultural in a very 21st-century way.
Vancouver's new Canadians, who 100 years ago crowded into the inner-city neighbourhoods of Strathcona and Mount Pleasant, are now mainly suburbanites. That's the picture that emerged from 2006 census data released today that showed the proportion of foreign-born residents is at its highest level nationally in 75 years.
Crowds of shoppers hit the stores along Robson Street. Census data shows more than one million immigrants have arrived in Canada in the last five years, settling in a country that is now home to 150 languages and people from more than 200 countries.
Photograph by : Stuart Davis/Vancouver Sun Files
Richmond now has the highest proportion, 57 per cent, of foreign-born residents of any city in Canada. Meanwhile, places like Burnaby, Surrey, Coquitlam, New Westminster, North Vancouver, and even Abbotsford have immigrant levels ranging from 20 to 50 per cent of their total population.
"That has huge implications for those areas, for the school systems, for services," said Dan Hiebert, the co-director of the research centre Metropolis B.C. "And this is changing the sociocultural nature of the suburbs."
The Statistics Canada numbers - dealing with immigration, language and mobility - confirm what Lower Mainland residents can see and feel all around them. In this region, where 40 per cent of residents were born elsewhere, Iranian specialty stores dot Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver, Korean businesses cluster around North Road in Coquitlam and Sikh temples dominate the skyline in South Fraser Way in Abbotsford and the Newton neighbourhood of Surrey.
Burmese children suddenly appear in Langley schools, African churches populate the New Westminster-Burnaby border and Chinese malls make Richmond look like a flattened-out Hong Kong.
And there's likely more of that to come, say experts.
Immigrants are moving to the suburbs for two reasons. One is that, like most groups, they move to places where they have friends and family.
"It's the snowball effect," said University of B.C. geographer David Ley. "Once there are a few people in one place, others will stick to them."
That's why many mainland Chinese newcomers, the province's biggest immigrant group of the past five years, are moving to Richmond or Coquitlam, why people from India, the second-largest, are joining those they already know in Surrey and Abbotsford, and those from the Philippines (group number three) are clustering in Vancouver and Richmond.
The other reason for the suburbanization of immigration is the cost of housing, say Ley and Hiebert. Poor immigrants are moving to where they can get affordable housing. The map of their clusters is a map to the cheap apartments of the Lower Mainland: Marpole in south Vancouver; the Kingsway corridor in Vancouver and Burnaby; central Surrey.
"This is really the other side of gentrification," said Ley. "Where [gentrifiers] are now is where immigrants aren't any more, like Kitsilano, Fairview, Commercial Drive."
And better off immigrants who are a step up the ladder and want to buy property - something they push for and achieve at greater rates than Canadian-born residents do - also find the suburbs help them achieve that dream more easily. The changes have prompted school boards and city councils to scramble to adapt.
In Surrey this morning, while the Statistics Canada officials were releasing their numbers, Mayor Dianne Watts was holding a meeting with all the groups who deal with her city's refugee population.
Surrey has the largest number of refugees of any city in B.C., about 3,500, and that's just one component of its huge jump in foreign-born residents, also the biggest jump of any city in B.C.
"I brought together some people who are trying to pull services together, just to get a handle on the situation," said Watts.
She said Surrey is struggling to cope with the impact on the school system of a flood of students who have lived in refugee camps all their life and getting stuck in grades according to their age even though they've never been to school before.
In Coquitlam, Mayor Maxine Wilson, who started a multicultural committee a year ago, is pulling groups together to try to create a more immigrant-welcoming place. This week, the Soroptomist Club there is holding a multicultural women's meeting to help newcomers talk about barriers to getting jobs.
On Saturday, an environmentalist and a journalist from the city's Mandarin-speaking community will present Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, subtitled in Mandarin, at a special show in council chambers.
"We're working on building reception, just breaking down the silos and getting people together," said Wilson.
The new demographics have transformed the Lower Mainland into a different country from the rest of B.C. There, with a few quirky exceptions like Kitimat or Qualicum Beach, the percentage of foreign-born residents in cities from Prince George to Revelstoke to Powell River is not just low but has actually declined in the past five years.
To some, it may appear as though Canada's major cities are in danger of being overwhelmed by immigration, with Toronto now consisting of 48 per cent foreign-born residents. But, in fact, the country hasn't yet even come close to its immigration levels of 100 years ago.
In the early years of the 20th century, Canada accepted more immigrants, proportionally, than any other country in the world. In three years, 1911, 1912, and 1913, it took in respectively 331,000 immigrants, then 376,000, then 401,000 as it enthusiastically worked to populate the Canadian West.
Those numbers have been unmatched any year since, even though the country's population has quadrupled. If Canada were to take in the same proportion of immigrants today, it would see 4.6 million newcomers in the next three years. Instead, levels have been averaging around 250,000 per year.
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