How diverse is your neighbourhood? A new website shows how immigration to Canada has transformed our cities
2024/12/17 Leave a comment
Good coverage of the super diversity website and the work by Dan Hiebert and Steven Vertovec:
Have you ever wondered how your local community stacks up when it comes to diversity in ethnicities, income levels, language spoken or education attainments?
Residents of Canada’s six largest metropolitan areas can now check that out through a website launched on Monday that tracks the transformation of the country by immigration down to the neighbourhood level.
Coined “Superdiversity,” the project crunches immigration and census data into interactive graphics and maps that showcase Canada’s changing landscapes and how socioeconomic indicators such as wealth, income, employment status and education play out across ethnic groups, generations of newcomers and neighbourhoods.
“We’re hoping to just help anyone come to a better understanding of the society that surrounds them that they’re part of,” said University of British Columbia professor emeritus Daniel Hiebert, a co-founder of the project.
“This is really about social change and the ability to show it based on data.”
Since Ottawa changed its immigration rules in the 1960s that favoured immigrants from the U.K., continental Europe and the U.S., Canada’s population has become increasingly diverse. The proportion of newcomers from the “traditional” source countries has dwindled to about 15 per cent from nearly 90 per cent.
The Superdiversity website shows how the annual admissions of permanent residents — broken down into economic, family and humanitarian classes — evolved from under 150,000 in 1980 to over 450,000 in 2023, as well as how the nationalities of each subgroup of newcomers changed over time to now being dominated by those from India, China and the Philippines.
It also documents how the annual inflow of temporary residents — divided into asylum seekers, international students and different types of work permit holders — skyrocketed in just a few years from under 200,000 to more than 1.6 million today, and how the source countries shifted under each category.
“When you see people who came from a particular country with a particular migration stream, with a particular age group and with a different gender pattern, you can see how these fit together to produce certain social outcomes,” said project co-founder Steven Vertovec, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany.
“By treating groups only as ethnic communities, we didn’t see the complexities and diversity within groups. You just treated all Indians as the same, all Italians and all Asians as the same.”…
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