The graphs showing the period of arrival of immigrants to British Columbia, Greater Vancouver, the City of Vancouver and the City of Richmond reveal the substantial growth in immigrant landings in recent years. Greater Vancouver continues to attract a very large proportion of the immigrants arriving in British Columbia, since jobs have been more plentiful there (especially in the sectors of the economy that hire large numbers of immigrant workers), and many come to join family members already living in the metropolitan region.  Within Greater Vancouver, the City of Vancouver remains the most important settlement location, but certain suburbs, especially Richmond, are playing a much larger role in this respect. In fact, approximately half of Richmond's total population, as of 1996, were born outside Canada.

The pie charts in the following page indicate the shift in the source regions of immigrants coming to Greater Vancouver.  As noted in the introduction, nearly everyone who came to Vancouver before 1961 was from Europe, but the ratio of immigrants from non-European countries has steadily grown.  Over time, Asia, particularly East Asia, has become the key source region of immigrants.  In 1996, the top five places of birth of the Greater Vancouver population were Canada, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, China, and India.

In the 1980s, we began to see a shift in the settlement location of immigrants in Greater Vancouver.  Prior to this time, the majority of immigrants found housing in the inner parts of the metropolitan region, mainly in the City of Vancouver's eastside.  During the 1980s, immigrants began to settle in adjacent municipalities. At first there was a kind of 'spill-over' into Burnaby and Richmond, but by the 1990s this became more generalized, and immigrants have begun to contribute to population growth in several of the more peripheral parts of Greater Vancouver, notably areas of the north shore and the Tri-cities (Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody).

As a result, there is a large population of people whose mother tongue was not English living in the City of Vancouver, especially concentrated in the eastern and southern neighbourhoods.  Further, the social geography of visible minority groups across the metropolitan region has become more complex.  In earlier days, non-European minorities congregated in Strathcona and other eastside neighbourhoods of the City of Vancouver, but this has changed. In particular, Richmond, Surrey, and the Tri-cities have become home to substantial visible minority populations.  Despite this trajectory of suburbanization, the most peripheral municipalities, such as Langley, house few immigrants.

The quotient maps provide some group-by-group detail to the general portrait of immigrant settlement in Greater Vancouver.  Note how some groups, such as the East Indian-origin population, are highly concentrated in specific neighbourhoods while others, such as those who trace their ancestry to Germany or the Philippines, are more widely distributed.  There are also intriguing distinctions within the large group who indicated Chinese ancestry.  When this population is broken down into national-origin subgroups, we find that immigrants coming from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan have pursued somewhat different residential choices in Greater Vancouver, with those coming from Taiwan the most dispersed of the three.  Other interesting patterns are visible when these detailed maps are explored further.

To summarize, the main purposes of the atlas are:

• To show that immigration is playing an increasing role in shaping the social geography of Greater Vancouver.
• To show that the impact of immigrant settlement in Greater Vancouver varies between different municipalities and neighbourhoods.
• And to give some indication of the complexity of these outcomes.

The most fundamental change in the social geography of immigrant settlement is the tendency of recent immigrants to choose to live in suburbs.  Fully two out of every three immigrants who arrived in Greater Vancouver between 1991 and 1996 lived, in 1996, beyond the boundaries of the City of Vancouver.  More and more, therefore, immigrants are adding to the social diversity of suburbs. While this has yet to happen on a large scale in the most distant municipalities, almost every area of metropolitan Vancouver has been shaped by the settlement of recent immigrants.