Foreword to the English version

The Settlement of New Immigrants survey (Enquête sur I'établissement des nouveaux immigrants) first appeared in French in 2001. It was written essentially for Québec francophones interested in immigration and naturally aware of the demographic and linguistic stakes facing the society in which they live. Moreover, a good number of these readers had doubtlessly already read or at least heard of the first reports published in the 1990s as part of this study.

Non-francophone readers, especially from outside Quebec, will therefore require certain background information not given in the original French version. We hope these readers will forgive us for making this background as broad as possible.

For several years now, a number of western countries have grappled with a new approach to immigration, mainly because of the general decline in fertility and the aging of their populations. Immigration is increasingly seen in industrialized countries as a factor with the potential to maintain economic growth and at the same time counter the undesirable effects of population aging.

However, for immigration to play this role most effectively, it is vital to achieve the successful integration of immigrants. And to do that, of course, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of integration and therefore to study it with all the resources and sophisticated analytic methods that modern social sciences make available to us. This is precisely the goal of the study described in this report.

To our knowledge, this is the first time in the history of immigration studies that such a longitudinal study has been undertaken and completed ; namely, one that covers an entire decade and was designed to follow in detail the settlement and integration process of an annual cohort of immigrants admitted to a given territory. And it is certainly not by chance that this first should occur in Quebec.

As the only majority francophone province in Canada, located within the largest and most powerful economic sphere in the world where the predominance of the English language faces no competition, Quebec grasped, well before other wealthy western societies, the scope of the demographic challenge and the role immigration would have to play in dealing with it.

To secure its survival as a French-speaking society, and to continue to grow and prosper despite a fertility rate insufficient for the replacement of generations for over three decades now, Quebec understood that it had to include immigration among its collective development tools and tackle the challenge of integrating immigrants.

The challenge is doubly difficult in Quebec, where a fully successful integration must be not only economic, as is the case everywhere else, but also linguistic. Although the great majority of its population has always been French-speaking, the integration of immigrants has traditionally and until recently taken place in English, as happens in the rest of North America.

To meet the immigration challenge, the Quebec government gradually assumed the jurisdiction in immigration granted it by the Canadian constitution, a jurisdiction officially shared between the two levels of government, but occupied until then by the federal authority alone. Successive agreements with the Canadian federal government have established Quebec's capacity to act in matters of immigration and integration of newcomers.

In parallel with this, Quebec adopted other measures to secure the survival of the French character of Quebec society. They include laws guaranteeing the predominance of French in the workplace, commerce and business, education, signs and public life in general.

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For more than ten years, Quebec has exercised decisive powers in the selection of immigrants who wish to settle on its territory, and it is solely in charge of integrating these immigrants.

Without going into detail and straying into nuances that would be necessary in a legal text, the division of responsibilities for immigration and integration between the Canadian federal government and the Quebec government can be described as follows :

• [Canada defines the general immigration classes (independent, family and refugee) and decides which class applicants belong to. It also has sole responsibility for setting and administering statutory admission rules concerning health, security and criminality. It alone rules on the recognition of refugee status of asylum seekers within the country ;
  
  
• [Québec, for its part, sets and applies alone the selection criteria used to evaluate applicants who are chosen based on their socio-economic potential (independents) and refugees abroad. It sets the applicable financial yardsticks that sponsors must satisfy in cases of family reunification. It is in sole charge of various welcome and integration programs for newcomers under all classes : French language training, assistance in seeking employment and housing, educational degree equivalence, support in accessing diverse services, etc.
  
  

At the same time as it implemented mechanisms to intervene in immigration matters, and aiming for more informed governance, the Quebec public administration entered into a partnership with university researchers to better understand and grasp the various phenomena at work in the process of immigrant integration.

It was in this context that the Settlement of New Immigrants survey was launched to follow, for ten years, the first cohort of immigrants to be admitted in Quebec and settle there after the Quebec government took sole charge of integration programs in 1990.

While the above lines do not fully cover the specific context of the immigration issue in Quebec, non-francophone readers should be better able to understand the emphasis placed in certain analyses on the linguistic theme. In other settings, this theme would no doubt be treated differently and more succinctly.

That said, the special nature of the Quebec situation does not render most findings here irrelevant for specialists working elsewhere. On the contrary, the settlement dynamics described in these pages have much in common with what occurs in other western societies open to immigration, in the areas of housing, employment and unemployment, access to services, instruction, insertion in networks of different types, etc.

Lastly, the decision to study only immigrants who settled in Montreal, the economic metropolis and main pole of attraction for immigrants to Quebec, allows us to better judge the effectiveness of a specific set of policies deployed within a society characterized by French-English duality.

Yvan Turcotte
Sous-ministre adjoint
Planification et Relations avec les citoyens
Ministère des Relations avec les citoyens et de l'lmmigration