Essay On Canadian Immigration

Immigration has played a large role in Canada’s history, and essentially has crafted the Canadian identity. Each time Canada’s immigration policy changed so did the flow and contextual backdrop of immigrants and thus the uniqueness of Canada (Passaris, 1998). Canadian immigration and essentially immigration policy is a multifaceted composition of an interrelated “set of guidelines, regulations and actions by government agents” (Green & Green, 2004). The economic forces of immigration have played a large role in influencing Canadian immigration policies over Canada’s large and vast immigration history and three major intentions are emphasized. Firstly, immigration was seen as a tool to increase Canada’s population faster than the rate that would

During this time immigration was used to address a conjunction of short and long-term development goals particularly within the agricultural sector and simply the requirement of people to populate the land also the fundamental power to determine the type of people that could immigrate to Canada was given to the Cabinet by Parliament (Green & Green, 2004). In the 1930s through to the end of the Second World War immigration saw a dramatic decline due to various societal and economic factors (Green& Green, 2004). In the 1950s through to the 1970s immigration policy was altered to be expended as a system to meet the assumed openings within different business sectors, to increase unskilled labour in areas of forestry and mining and to increase the skilled labour market to bridge the gap between the lack of development of Canadian educational and training institutions, immigration policy implementation was then transferred to the minister of immigration and appointed immigration officers in the 1952 Act (Green & Green, 2004). As a reaction to significant pressures from newly independent countries of the commonwealth a change in immigration regulation was made in 1962 to address the constraints of non-European immigration (Kalbach, 1999). This was a

Canada’s current liberal and vigorous immigration policy has allowed for the acceptance of an average of 240,000 immigrants a year from 1995-2008 and is projected to welcome approximately 300,000 this year, with an emphasis on family reunification and refugees, a change from the historical source of economic migration as the main source of immigrants (Kelley & Trebilcock, 2010, p 19; Zilio, 2016). Canada’s sources of natural increase (births to deaths) of the population as well as international migration are changing rapidly and it is a studied trend, which outlines immigration, will soon be heavily relied upon as the most feasible source of continued population growth (Jedwab, 2016). Natural population growth has been dramatically decreasing since the 1960s largely due to declining fertility rates as well as the aging and death of older populations (Figure 1) (Statistics Canada, 2016). Statistics Canada illustrates a prediction of the Canadian population that pushes for an increase in immigration due to the enhanced aging of the population and an increased number of deaths (2016). Immigration is a prominent driving factor behind a maintainable population as without increased immigration Canada’s