Summary: Non-European Immigrants In Canada

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Migration is not a new concept in terms of Canadian history. In fact, Canada is primarily a nation of migrants. Canada as a country has a greater percentage of foreign born citizens in it’s population than both the United States of America and a majority of European countries (Reitz, 2014). The proportion of foreign born citizens in Canada is 0.8 of the total Canadian population (Reitz, Lecture 1). This is almost a full 1% of Canada’s total population. Due to the mass immigration to Canada the government has introduced new terminology in order to label certain individuals who do not fit into the perceived norm of being classified as either European or Caucasian. In order to classify these individuals, the term “Visible Minority” began to be commonly used in political jargon. Earlier uses of the term visible minority was used in office in the parliamentary report titled Equality now! The Report of the Special …show more content…

Without the term it would be more difficult to categorize the differences between Non-European immigrants in relation to European immigrants. Something of interest is the fact that non-European immigrants tend to have higher difficulties in finding work even though on average they tend to be more highly educated than their European immigrant counterparts (Kalbach,2000). It seems that priority in jobs are given to those who fit the stereotypical view of what is considered to be a “Canadian” even if they are. This is shown by the fact that the immigration process itself has been less selective in Greek and Portuguese immigrants than they have been of Chinese immigrants Kalbach,2000). Despite the fact that the points system is now what is used in order to pick immigrants and the non-racial policy has officially been in place since Ellen Fairclough the Progressive Conservative Immigration Minister changed the policy in 1962 (Reitz, Lecture

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