1. Demography

The concern with the demographic aspect of immigration and immigrant integration may be misplaced, since Canada has no population policy, and no demographic goals regarding population size. (In fact there is no official target regarding the size, rate of growth, age - sex composition of the population, or its regional distribution). Thus, with no population policy, there are no criteria or yardsticks against which to measure the success or failure of the contributions of immigration to national Canadian demographic objectives.

(One might add parenthetically that there is also no national family policy. For example, the Canadian government seems to assume a neutral position on whether there is a national interest amenable to policy intervention on issues such as whether children should or should not be born into and raised by two- parent families; whether separation and divorce are positive or negative; what role the state can or should play in caring for the very young or the very old, etc. This absence is related to some of the issues itemized in the domains, given that immigration and immigrant cultures may impact on trends in these areas as well.)

a. state of knowledge

Demography sees immigration as one of the four determinants of population size and change, along with emigration, births, and deaths. Demography is the study of the size, growth, composition (mainly by age structure and sex ratio) and distribution of a population. The study of population -- linked to social demography-- focuses on the causes and consequences of these various demographic variables. From a purely technical demographic perspective, the state of knowledge is very high. This stems mainly from the high quality of data available from the Census, Statistics Canada, and the Dept. of Citizenship and Immigration for demographic analysis on immigration.

While demography has the strongest quantitative data base, it also lacks an established research tradition involving qualitative methods, or laboratory studies, which could provide context and insight into demographic behaviours.

In general there is socio-demographic convergence of the foreign born to native born over time. This pattern holds for almost all of the variables of interest to demographers, in particular for measures of occupational and income attainment. Immigrants in general have higher life expectancy (and lower morbidity rates) possibly because of selectivity effects. But there is a need to verify this over all groups, especially visible minorities. There is wide variety among different immigrant groups in this same set of variables.

Immigration is a weak substitute for fertility as a motor of population growth or as a way to alter permanently the dependency ratio, compared to natural increase. It has had minimal impacts on the age structure. But it may be more cost effective, since the cost of "producing" adult immigrants is borne elsewhere, an issue which needs more research. Immigration may very slightly attenuate population aging.

It would be valuable to have demographic data on the behaviour of children of immigrants, but this is difficult to obtain from census records, unless place of birth of parents is added to the Census questionnaire.

Despite the general record of convergence, the demographic data suggest that more recent waves of immigrants may be taking longer to "catch up" socio-economically to the native born than was the case for earlier post-war waves of immigrants. More work is needed to determine how much of this is due to broad changes in the economy, to discrimination, to differing demographic and human capital characteristics of the recent immigrants, and to ongoing transformations in the socio-demographic make-up -- including higher levels of educational attainment -- of the host population.

Immigration has also had a major impact on changing the strength of the English and French languages in Canada, at the expense of the latter. As immigrants recently have been integrated in Quebec's francophone majority, the province's share in the Canadian population has declined. The diversification of the population through immigration has had a major impact on the historic dualistic conception of Canada.

b. research agenda

It is important to determine the reasons for the apparent dip in economic success of more recent immigrants, compared to those of the past, after comparable periods in Canada.

There is no clear causal association between demographic variables and economic variables, established by comparative data or the professional demographic literature. Wealthy countries may be large sized or small, densely or sparsely populated, growing rapidly or not at all. In Canada the conventional wisdom has been one in which population growth and immigration have been associated with economic growth and increases in the standard of living. While this has historically been the long term pattern, the current debate is whether these relationships will continue in the future, especially given changes in both the character of immigration and in the receiving society (e.g. racism) and economy (e.g. downsizing) of Canada.

The causes and impacts of the sex composition (sex ratio) of immigrants as these relate to other socio-demographic variables, including family formation, requires further research. Fertility and mortality characteristics of immigrants also merit further study, particularly for some groups which may not match the general convergence patterns.

It is also important to make use of the newest census question on language. That newly added question asks if respondents can speak any languages other than their mother tongue, home language, or the official languages. Non-official language knowledge will be seen to be greater than thought in the past. The utility of such language knowledge in general can be analyzed within the context of globalization.

Much descriptive demography has been done, presenting the different profiles of immigration and ethnicity in various regions. But most in-depth analytical work -- and publications for users -- seems to have been carried out at the national or provincial level, rather than with cities as units of analysis.

On the other hand, more work might be done on the phenomena of return migration and onward migration, especially as these relate to the issue of globalization, and the roles of diasporic ties. There is also a need for further research on the internal migration patterns of immigrants within Canada. Demography tells us where immigrants arrive and disperse in Canada, but not precisely why, or with what impact.

Immigration today and in the future may be more difficult to accommodate in a condition of low fertility and low natural increase; in the past immigration occurred in environments of substantial natural increase. This softened the tensions of new arrivals. The changed environment may limit the usefulness of demographic comparisons with the past.

c. methodological issues

An emerging methodological dilemma may flow from changes in census and other questions concerning ethnic and racial origin. Statistics Canada has devoted much time and energy to this issue of definition and classification. But the meaning of single vs. multiple origin ethnic responses, the sub-group variation within any place of origin or ethnic category, the increasing numbers of Canadians who select "Canadian" as an origin, may impact on studies from all the social sciences which link immigration to issues of ethnic- racial origin and possible inequality. It may leave unaffected the quality of data on the foreign born. But the likely increasing fuzziness of the ethnic origin category is another compelling argument for collecting census data on birthplace of parents.

This is distinct from the problem of determining the meaningfulness of census categories for the individuals and groups so labelled.

The main demographic technique apart from descriptive statistics is the use of simulations or regression models to project future outcomes under different assumptions. But projections are not predictions, and all things are rarely equal.

In general, use of the category "foreign born" masks a great deal of variation. For immediate policy purposes, the review calls for more of a focus on visible minority immigrants. Data which simply compare the Canadian and foreign born, without controlling for ethnic origin and period of immigration are of little analytical value . Yet this has been the basic analytical technique used by demographers, and is most common in the presentation of published data.

Very little demographic research is focused within cities per se. In fact, variation between cities is under-researched, notably when compared to national data. Even variation among Canada's largest three cities and smaller urban centres is relatively ignored. There are limits regarding the value for urban research of the Public Use Micro-data File; one needs accessible full census tapes for each urban area. Indeed, excellent research can be done at the level of census tracts themselves, a proxy for neighbourhoods.

Immigrants congregate in certain regions and metropolitan centres. But despite the fact that demography is interested in the spatial distribution of the population, there has been little demographic work on general urban/rural consequences of immigration, or on movements from urban to suburban to exurban areas. Immigration may impact upon these processes through concentrations of the foreign born in urban areas (analogous to "white flight" in the United States).

There has been little systematic demographic comparison of specific immigrant minority groups, perhaps because some of this work may be politically sensitive. Even the category "visible minority" masks substantial internal variation. The method of triangulated comparative work has also been ignored. This could involve comparisons of one -- or more-- ethnic groups in the countries of origin, in Canada, and in one other specific country of destination (e.g. Chinese in Canada, Australia, and China). Indeed, it is precisely this sort of research that the international dimension of the Metropolis Project is well placed to support.