The evolving relationship between immigrant settlement and neighbourhood disadvantage in Canadian cities, 1991-2001

The additional support of the Vancouver Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis (RIIM) is also gratefully acknowledged, as is the assistance of the Toronto Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Junior Faculty Grant Program. [...] The paper highlights the evolving and increasingly divergent cases of these cities, emphasizes the need to pay closer attention to the contextual, temporal and spatial contingency of the relationship between concentrated urban disadvantage and concentrated immigrant settlement, and considers the continued appropriateness of assessing the immigrant experience with traditional rather than immigrant [...] The emerging story of immigrant settlement in Canadian cities and its connection with neighbourhood based poverty and deprivation must be recognized as an evolving and spatially contingent one – a function of the complex interplay between the distinct urban and neighbourhood contexts in which immigrant groups settle, the skill sets and support systems brought with them, and the economic conditions [...] Three dominant immigrant settlement areas are evident in 1991: a broad concentration including several contiguous tracts of very high immigrant representation in the northern part of Scarborough bordering Markham; a corridor running northwest from the downtown core to the edge of Toronto’s old metropolitan boundary;4 and another broad concentration of settlement in the western suburb of Mississaug [...] It is important to emphasize that the suburbanization of immigrant residence in Toronto, and all Canadian cities, is a function of both the initial settlement of new arrivals and the secondary settlement of more established and affluent immigrants seeking access to homeownership and the suburban dream.