Do Immigrants Who Land In Atlantic Canada With Family Stay?

“Immigrant retention in Atlantic Canada has tended to lag behind the rest of the country with lower retention rates than other regions. To date, most of the focus on retaining immigrants has looked at individual-level characteristics such as their age, level of education, or whether they hold a job or not. Often over looked is the role that family members play as anchors in a community. The need to understand the role of the family in the immigration experience is considered critical (see Arat-Koc, 2006; Ellis and Wright, 2005; Kustec, 2006; Rumbault, 1997). Research, moreover, shows that presence of family in the process of immigrant settlement is important and family members play crucial supporting roles of immigrants (see VanderPlaat, Ramos, and Yoshida 2012). Family often help principal applicants by providing child care, working as unpaid labour in small businesses, or offering emotional and psychological support. They are largely overlooked in the current Canadian and provincial immigration systems and pathways to migrate to the country (see Dobrowolsky and Ramos 2014). Most research and policy, however, focuses on immigrants as individuals overlooking the impacts of family on settlement. This is especially the case for large scale studies using quantitative analysis. For these reasons, this report examines how retention is affected by whether or not immigrants who land in the region come with or without family members. As a result, this report examines the impact family have on retention by looking at whether economic immigrant taxfilers landing in an Atlantic Canadian province between 2000 and 2009 are more likely to stay in the same province if at the time of landing they settle with a family member, including children and/or spouses and partners. The report also offers an overview of how immigrant landing families can be constructed through administrative immigrant landing records
and taxfiles.”