IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION ON SMALL TOWNS INCREASING

Immigration to cities helping rural towns vanish

Updated: Tue May. 12 2009 9:30:31 AM

Mark Milner, CTV.ca News

A new report on immigration in Ontario says that its growth in urban centres will have an unintended side effect: small towns and rural areas will see their population shrink and possibly vanish.

The report by two Ryerson University experts in immigration policy suggests that while many communities would welcome immigration, more than half of Ontario's immigrants will instead settle in large urban areas such as Toronto.

"The bigger problem is that there just aren't a sufficient number of immigrants settling in more rural and northern parts of the province," explained John Shields, one of the two co-authors of the report, to CTV.ca. He partnered with Magdy EIDakiky, a colleague from Ryerson who was upgrading his PhD, for this study.

Shields said found the gap between the numbers of people who migrate to the GTA and northern Ontario surprising.

"The figures in the graph really show it," he explained. "They're quite stark."

"We have to remember there are very few settlers that go to the north at all. It's less than 500 per year between 1996 and 2006."

Some groups in Ontario are starting to tackle this problem. Late last month, the Conference Board of Canada held a roundtable meeting in Chatham, Ont. on how to make small towns more attractive to immigrants.

"I think we've got a whole host of small communities beginning to speak about this," said Shields. "I think a lot of the smaller communities are beginning to wake up to the problem of demographic decline."

Another way Ontario could deal with this problem is to look at Manitoba's program that matched up immigrants with jobs in rural areas.

"Manitoba's been very successful," said Shields. By matching job skill sets with what cities need, "they've brought people into smaller types of communities."

"Inevitably, these are smaller scale projects, because of the amount of detail and matching that needs to be done. But when implemented, they tend to be quite successful."

He explained that since most people already know immigrants are attracted to the GTA, the aim of the report was to give a graphical depiction to the data.

The report uses data from both the 1996 and 2006 Census, and shows that about half of the people immigrating to Canada settled in Ontario, with the vast majority (more then 830,000) in central Ontario.

That's an especially large number in light of how many people immigrated to other regions of Ontario over the same time period:

146,450 immigrated to western Ontario (including Hamilton, Essex and Waterloo)
68,635 immigrated to eastern Ontario (including Ottawa, Peterborough and Frontenac)
4,850 immigrated to northern Ontario (including Sudbury and Thunder Bay)
About 456,000 people settled in the GTA in the same period of time.

A 2008 report by the province of Ontario shows that while Ontario's population is expected to increase by more then 3.5 million by 2031, the population of northern Ontario is expected to decline.

The report also shows where ethnic groups tend to settle. Immigrants from Asia and the Middle East are the more likely to settle in urban areas while people from Europe are more likely to settle in rural areas.

For example, 68 per cent of immigrants that settled in Toronto between 1996 and 2006 came from Asia and the Middle East and 15 per cent came from Europe. But for the same period in Huron County, just 11 per cent were from Asia or the Middle East and 72 per cent from Europe.

Why are immigrants migrating to big cities?

"I think some of the reasons are quite obvious," said Shields. Cities like Toronto provide "a lot of employment opportunity as well as entrepreneurial opportunities" for immigrants.

Additionally, a city with a large ethic population will already have a community an immigrant can link into, people they can readily talk with and stores and services that cater to their needs.

In this sense diversity begets diversity, explained Shields. As cities attract immigrants, "they become incredibly more vibrant and diverse, which tends to reinforce the pattern."

"All of this builds a network that is encouraging for their migration to that location."