Immigration and the Changing Social Geography of Greater Vancouver

I MMIGRATION IS REDEFINING T H E DEMOGRAPHIC, S o c i a l, a n d economic life of large Canadian cities, and hardly a day passes without some comment in the media on Canada's immigration system. The level of academic attention given to immigration is also high, and the volume of writing on the subject is increasing rapidly. Despite this impressive research record, we lack sustained studies that document and analyze the impact of immigrant settlement on particular Canadian cities.2 This article is intended to address one important gap by presenting a broad overview of late twentieth-century immigration and its impact on the social geography of Greater Vancouver, particularly during the years since the major policy changes of the 1960s. T h e removal of preferential treatment of pro-spective immigrants from Britain, the US, the Commonwealth, and certain European countries enabled a culturally more diverse cohort of immigrants to enter Canada. Greater Vancouver quickly became a principal destination for people migrating from East, Southeast, and South Asia, and also attracted many people from other non-traditional sources, such as the Middle East and Latin America. In the process, the ethnocultural composition of the metropolitan population has changed. T h e recomposition of Greater Vancouver's population has affected the delivery of social services, the nature of 1 The focus of this article is on Greater Vancouver, the metropolitan region of around 1.8 million people that includes the City of Vancouver plus its surrounding suburbs. When statistics for the region are reported, they refer to the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) as defined by Statistics Canada. The CMA is a little larger than the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), an administrative body created by the provincial government to manage regional transportation and infrastructure.