Graphic Monday: 55 years of immigration to Canada

Who comes to Canada?

Depends who’s in charge here, as well as what conflicts and political shifts are playing out elsewhere in the world.

Last week’s National Household Survey gave a (statistically dubious) snapshot of Canada’s growing immigrant community. We decided to see how the faces of Canada’s immigrants have changed over time. Short answer? A lot.

The data begins with a dramatic spike in 1957, still a record-setting year for immigration to Canada. In this period, immigrants are still drawn largely from Northern Europe: 1957 is the peak year for immigration from Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. “Other Europe” will also include many immigrants from Hungary, fleeing a brutal Soviet crackdown in that country the previous year.

The next dramatic spike is in 1967, which marked the introduction of the points system, designed to bring more objectivity to the immigrant selection process. In this period there is a shift to southern Europe and the Caribbean: 1966 is the peak year for immigration from Italy, 1967 from Greece, 1974 from Portugal and the West Indies.

The early 1970s see a spike in immigration from the United States, driven largely by people fleeing the Vietnam-era draft. (This interactive breaks U.S.-source immigration out in much more detail.) Immigration from the United States dropped sharply as the war wound down and the draft ended – but it did revive, on a more modest scale, after the invasion of Iraq.

The opening of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opens new sources of immigration: 1990 is the peak year for immigration from Poland.

Increasingly, however, Canada was drawing more and more of its new citizens from Asia.

Britain formally handed Hong Kong over to Chinese control in 1997, but the date had been public since the mid-1980s. As the date approached, thousands of Hong Kong residents, terrified at the prospect of being ruled by the government that had massacred protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, fled the city. 1994 is the peak year for immigration from Hong Kong. The same period sees a sharp increase in a category that may reflect immigration from mainland China.

(Unhelpfully, the original data lumps Asian countries other than Hong Kong, India, Vietnam and the Philippines in a category of “Other Asia,” making it hard to break out major source countries like South Korea, mainland China, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.)

2005 is the peak year for immigration from India; 2010 from the Philippines. Separate figures from Citizenship and Immigration Canada indicate 28,695 people immigrated to Canada from China in 2011, making that country one of the top sources of Canadian newcomers.