Douglas Todd: Aboriginals and whites leaving Metro Vancouver

2018/03/13 Leave a comment

Kind of interesting that some of the debate is now focussing on white enclaves as much as ethnic enclaves:

Aboriginals and whites are leaving Metro Vancouver for other regions of B.C., particularly to live in the Fraser Valley, Vancouver Island and the Okanagan, according to Statistics Canada.

A net total of 9,345 whites and 460 Indigenous people left Metro for other parts of the province in the one-year period ending July, 2016, according to newly released Statistics Canada data.

Two other demographic groups that are tending to say goodbye to Metro Vancouver are those who are born in Canada and those between ages 55 and 65.

It’s been more than two decades since Metro Vancouver has experienced so many residents depart for other regions of the province, according to data provided by Patrick Charbonneau, a senior analyst at Statistics Canada.

Out-migration trends similar to Metro Vancouver have also occurred in Toronto and Montreal. In all three cities, said Charbonneau, “there were more non-visible minorities (i.e. whites) leaving those regions for elsewhere in the province than the opposite.”

While Metro Vancouver is generally losing people to the rest of B.C., Statistics Canada reports that Victoria and Kelowna have become the only cities in Canada that are growing because of inter-provincial migration.

Meanwhile, people of colour (which StatsCan refer to as “visible minorities”), are generally not moving out of Metro Vancouver to other parts of the province. They are, however, arriving in the city in large numbers through immigration.

Several reasons are being offered for the exodus of whites, aboriginals and older people from Metro Vancouver. Some mayors say Metro Vancouver residents are seeking lower-cost housing outside the city. Others point to how retirement-age homeowners are cashing out on Metro Vancouver dwellings that have skyrocketed in price. And scholars point to demographic trends in which people of the same ethnicity often choose to live among each other.

“Across the Western world, white majorities, especially those with children, have a tendency to gravitate to neighbourhoods that are both relatively white and have limited ethnic change,” said Eric Kaufmann, a University of London, Birkbeck, professor, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver by parents of mixed ethnicity.

“This is true in the U.S., Canada and Britain. In diverse London, England, for instance, around 600,000 white Britons left the city in the 2000s, while 1.6 million non-white British arrived. Ethnic own-group attraction, rather than white flight or economic forces, best explains the pattern,” said Kaufmann, an often-cited specialist on global migration patterns.

Through extensive research, Kaufmann and his colleagues have found that diverse cities, like Metro Vancouver, “tend to lose white populations at a faster rate, while less diverse cities gain them, or lose whites at a slower rate.” His findings could explain one of the reasons Victoria and Kelowna, which have far less ethnic diversity than Metro Vancouver, are growing as a result of inter-provincial migration.

Figures from the 2016 Canadian census show that whites recently became a minority in the metropolises of Toronto and Metro Vancouver. The relatively small Aboriginal population of Metro Vancouver is also declining proportionally.

In the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, the ethnic Chinese population has expanded in a few decades by more than 80,000, while the white population has declined by more than 30,000.

A Postmedia series showed that Metro Vancouver is developing distinct ethnic enclaves. Ethnic Chinese now predominate in large sections of Richmond and South Asians make up three-quarters of many neighbourhoods in north Surrey. Meanwhile, whites tend to make up large majorities in suburbs such as White Rock, North Vancouver and Langley.

Despite significant inter-provincial migration trends, immigration from outside the country is changing the ethnic face of Metro Vancouver and Canada’s largest cities the most quickly.

The cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are projected to have fewer people of European origin, according to StatsCan. More than 60 per cent of all immigrants to Canada have moved to these three major cities, and more than four of five of all recent immigrants come from Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

Metro Vancouver took in 142,000 new immigrants between 2011 and 2016 — and about 85 per cent of those immigrants were people of colour. Many choose to live in ethnic enclaves.

Working with political scientist Gareth Harris, Kaufmann has tracked “white withdrawal” in Britain and Canada, monitoring how whites tend to “unconsciously” move out of neighbourhoods when a large influx of non-white immigrants moves in.

In their book, Changing Places: Mapping the White British Response to Ethnic Change, Kaufmann and Harris don’t use the American term, “white flight,” to describe this pattern because they don’t think it is normally fuelled by racism or xenophobia.

“White conservatives and liberals, racists and cosmopolitans, all move to relatively white areas at similar rates,” Kaufmann and Harris say in Changing Places, published by Demos, which describes itself as “Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank.”

Comparing Metro Vancouver to Toronto and Montreal, Statistics Canada data reveals that in the one-year period ending July, 2016, Greater Toronto, had a net loss of 22,555 whites to other areas of Ontario, which was more than it lost of people of colour (5,265).

Montreal had a net gain of people of colour from other areas of the province of Quebec, while experiencing a net loss of 7,075 whites.

 

Source: Aboriginals and whites leaving Metro Vancouver

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Whites Have Huge Wealth Edge Over Blacks (but Don’t Know It) – The New York Times

2017/09/20 Leave a comment

I expect there may be some similar misperceptions among Canadians regarding income and other gaps:

Psychologists at Yale recently asked hundreds of Americans these two questions:

The Yale researchers suspected that many people would not get the answers right.

“I’m a person who studies inequality, who should really know how inequality looks,” said one of the psychologists, Michael Kraus, who researches the behaviors and beliefs that help perpetuate inequality. “And I look at the black-white gap, and I’m shocked at the magnitude.”

Black families in America earn just $57.30 for every $100 in income earned by white families, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. For every $100 in white family wealth, black families hold just $5.04.

If Mr. Kraus, of all people, is taken aback by these numbers, what are the odds that most Americans have a good understanding of them? The answer, he and his colleagues fear, has broad implications for how we understand our society and what we’re willing to do to make it fairer.

Americans, and higher-income whites in particular, vastly overestimate progress toward economic equality between blacks and whites, the psychologists reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans believe that blacks and whites are more equal today than they truly are on measures of income, wealth, wages and health benefits. And they believe more historical progress has occurred than is the case, suggesting “a profound misperception of and unfounded optimism” regarding racial equality.

“It seems that we’ve convinced ourselves – and by ‘we’ I mean Americans writ large – that racial discrimination is a thing of the past,” said Jennifer Richeson, who was another of the study’s authors, along with Julian Rucker, a doctoral student. “We’ve literally overcome it, so to speak, despite blatant evidence to the contrary.”

To understand how people have perceived that progress, the researchers asked blacks and whites of varying income levels to estimate answers to the questions above in both recent years and historically. They also asked about how much black workers with a high school diploma but no college degree earn relative to whites of the same education level, and how the earnings of blacks and whites with a four-year college degree compare.

The present-day results, aggregated across several surveys used in the study, are compared here with actual government data:

Why would people get these questions so wrong — and consistently in the direction of too much optimism? (This study was also conducted after the 2016 election.) Blacks overestimated equality, too, but the biggest effects were among wealthy whites.

The researchers suspect that the answer in part has to do with how little exposure Americans have to people who are unlike them. Given how economically and racially segregated the country remains, many Americans, and especially wealthy whites, have little direct knowledge of what life looks like for families in other demographic groups.

But the pattern this study identifies isn’t simply about lack of access to accurate information. As Mr. Kraus points out, popular videos and charts regularly circulate on social media highlighting the startling levels of inequality in America. And yet, many people who click on them forget about the severity of inequality just long enough to be surprised by it again in the future.

“Despite this information being out there, we don’t really take it in,” Mr. Kraus said. This happens “in a way that suggests that maybe we’re motivated to forget it, or motivated to distort it in our own minds.”

He and Ms. Richeson suspect that we also overgeneralize from other markers of racial progress: the election of a black president, the passage of civil rights laws, the sea change in public opinion around issues like segregation. If society has progressed in these ways, we assume there’s been great economic progress, too.

We’re inclined, as well, to believe that society is fairer than it really is. The reality that it’s not — that even college-educated black workers earn about 20 percent less than college-educated white ones, for example — is uncomfortable for both blacks who’ve been harmed by that unfairness and whites who’ve benefited from it.

“It’s very difficult to consider the possibility that some of what we’ve achieved or gained is due to forces that aren’t our own individual hard work,” Ms. Richeson said. “That’s hard to grapple with, especially in American society. We really believe in egalitarianism and meritocracy.”

These findings suggest that the motivation to see the world as fair may be even stronger in this context than stereotypes white Americans hold, for instance, equating blacks with poverty.

The researchers found in some additional surveys that whites answer these questions more accurately when they’re first asked to consider an America where discrimination persists. If we want people to have a better understanding of racial inequality, this implies that the solution isn’t simply to parrot these statistics more widely. It’s to get Americans thinking more about the forces that underlie them, like continued discrimination in hiring, or disparities in mortgage lending.

It’s a myth that racial progress is inevitable, Ms. Richeson said. “But it’s also dangerous insofar as it keeps us blind to considerable inequality in our nation that’s quite foundational,” she said. “Of course we can’t address it if we’re not even willing to acknowledge it.”

And if we’re not willing to acknowledge it, she adds, that has direct consequences for whether Americans are willing to support affirmative action policies, or continued enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, or renewed efforts at school desegregation.

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