Former immigrants during a Canadian citizenship ceremony
Between 2011 and 2016, the country welcomed 1.2 million newcomers, of whom 60.3% were "economic" immigrants. Almost half of them went through the skilled worker program.
Current immigrants are more willing than before to settle in the western provinces – Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Ontario was home to 39% of arrivals. This is lower than the 2001 level, when 55.9% of newcomers chose Ontario as their place of residence.
Cities in the prairies received a disproportionately large number of new immigrants. Nevertheless, 56% of them live in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and their surroundings.
More than 60% of new immigrants come from Asia and the Middle East. However, Africa has now surpassed Europe as the second most important source of new immigrants – their number increased to 13.4%.
The largest source of newcomers is the Philippines (15.6%), followed by India (12.1%) and China (10.6%). About three percent of new immigrants come from the United States. Those from France and the United Kingdom accounted for about four percent of all new immigrants in Canada.
Largely due to the influx of refugees, Syria became the seventh most important supplier of immigrants. In 2011, this country was in 50th place.
The 2016 census also showed that 7.7 million Canadians belong to visible minorities, making up 22.3% of the population. In 1981, 4.7% of arrivals identified themselves as belonging to this category, and by 2036 this group could grow to about one third.
South Asians are the largest visible minority group – at 25.1% of the total population. Another 20.5% of visible minorities are Chinese, and 15.6% are black.
As Russianweek.ca notes, Statistics Canada data also show that the growth rate of the indigenous population is four times higher than that of other non-indigenous Canadian groups. In 2016, the indigenous population in the country reached almost 1.7 million people.