The shifting face of immigration

Just as the power structure is radically altered, a question arises: what next?

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Since the beginning of time, or at least since the founding of this city, the Vancouver mind has been repeatedly fertilized by the waves of immigrants washing through its neighbourhoods. Immigrants are also now expected to be responsible for all of our pensions, as Canada would otherwise by now have joined Italy, Japan and Russia with a declining (and rapidly aging) population. We expect a lot from them.

The bulk of immigrants to Vancouver the last two decades have been from China and its immediate neighbours in the far east, and India, and its immediate neighbours on that subcontinent. It is never the city’s choice where immigrants come from, but the happy result is a totally new business and elite class emerging in Vancouver, and with that comes a recharged entrepreneurialism.

That process can only become more intense as the two home countries continue to rise up as the two most dynamic and fastest growing economies in the world. But there is another side to that coin. Insofar as immigrants are usually economically motivated, as India and China’s economies expand and their ability to spread prosperity grows, fewer Indians and Chinese, as well as those from their neighbourhood, will be seeking to emigrate to Vancouver. The brain-drain, as well as the sparkling entrepreneur-drain and the capital drain that Vancouver in particular has been the lucky recipient of for the last couple of decades, will stop very soon.

Not too long ago, a Europe decimated by war threw boatloads of young, bright, and entrepreneurial Italians, Scots, Greeks, and Poles at Vancouver. These immigrants came to form the business and elite class in the city two generations ago, and they remain today very much in control of the local power structures. But as the economies of Italy, Greece, and eventually others improved, immigration from European countries to Vancouver dried up. Today there are hardly any immigrants to Canada from anywhere in Europe.

The same twin processes—declining levels of immigrants while those here emerge higher up in the power structure—will occur to the flows of immigrants coming from India and China. Not only must cities like Vancouver remake themselves to adjust to the changing realities of this shifting power structure, but also, the city must wonder where the next waves of immigrants will come from, if indeed there will be a next wave in the increasingly globalized world.

Vancouver has always done well by offering the best and brightest who make it here a reasonable health and education system for them and their families, strong governing institutions not riddled through with too serious a level of corruption, and pretty good prospects for prosperity with a bit of cleverness and some hard work. But if that is what is becoming available at home around most of the world, we aren’t going to continue to attract anyone here with those slim offerings anymore. If it’s true that immigration is critical to our pensions, our economy, and our whole frame of mind—and everything in this city’s history says it is—then we have to offer up something else a little more interesting to keep them coming, from wherever they may come next.

The immigrant Italian and Greek communities, as well as others, are responsible for the open, tolerant, progressive and fair city we find ourselves enjoying today. What further improvements might the newer immigrant communities make as they take over the power structures? Time will tell.

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