Good morning. Thank you for the invitation to present to this committee.
The remarks I will share with you are based on research that I conducted on parent and grandparent immigrants, published in the Canadian Ethnic Studies journal in 2012, and it looks at what parents and grandparents contribute as well as some observations on demographic and policy issues related to newcomers and their extended families.
In talking with you, there are three basic points that I would like to share. The first is that parents and grandparents make significant economic contributions to Canadian society as well as non-economic ones that are often overlooked in the discussion. Second, newcomers are highly mobile and skilled. Offering a viable means for them to be with their elders and extended family will anchor them in their communities. Three, when considering improving access to family through super visas, it's important to consider the pragmatics of the visa option versus more long-term options to gain permanent residency.
Let me expand on each of these three points.
First, the research I conducted with Madine VanderPlaat and Yoko Yoshida that was published in the Canadian Ethnic Studies journal recognizes that Canada has increasingly favoured immigration policies based on human capital theory as well as economic outcomes, often at the cost of other pathways. While immigration is on the increase, there has been a downward trend in the number of family class entrants admitted to the country over the last few decades. The group most affected is sponsored parents and/or grandparents, who are also the most vulnerable to criticism against family class immigration.
Largely, the discussion on family class immigration is centred on the perceived lack of potential economic contributions of these immigrants. Such a focus, however, overlooks the feminized nature of this type of migration and the many non-economic contributions that immigrants make.
Using the multinomial logistic regression of the longitudinal survey of immigrants to Canada, we examined both the economic and non-economic impacts and contributions of sponsored parents and grandparents compared to immigrants of a similar age migrating under other immigration categories.
What we found was that sponsored parents and grandparents make significant economic contributions to Canadian society as well as non-economic ones. Many of the parents and grandparents take up paid employment, and this increases over their duration in Canada. We also found that parents and grandparents make a number of non-economic contributions such as caring for family and offering related family supports. This is in line with other research that shows that family migrants help with emotional support, child care, elder care and helping the household more generally and, in the case of small business, they often help out with small businesses as well.
Our research also showed that parent and grandparent immigrants are younger than most people expect. The average age was roughly 60 years old for both the parents and the grandparents combined. What this means is that many of the parents who come to Canada are in their fifties, and some are even in their mid to late forties when newcomers are younger. This means that they have quite a bit of working life left in their careers, if they choose to pursue them.
The second point that I want to emphasize is that, given the supportive roles that parents and grandparents offer newcomers, they potentially play an anchoring role that will help newcomers put down more long-term roots in their communities. Research shows that, once a person has migrated, they are more likely to migrate again. Canada attracts highly skilled newcomers who have options to move within Canada, but they are also highly mobile and have the option to move outside of Canada. As people age and their parents and grandparents also age, this creates a pull factor for newcomers to leave the country to tend to their parents and/or grandparents.
Having the opportunity to have parents or grandparents join newcomers creates an anchor effect. It removes that pull factor that might draw them out of the country. It is also an anchor in that parents and grandparents are often less mobile than their children because of their age and other socio-economic factors. This can potentially play an important role in anchoring newcomers to communities that experience high rates of out-migration such as those in Atlantic Canada, the Prairies, rural communities or even in the north.
The third point that I wanted to expand on is something that you already know, which is that sponsoring and connecting with family is one of the biggest concerns newcomers face after they arrive in Canada—