Period of arrival
This graph shows the composition of the immigrant population living in British Columbia and Greater Vancouver in 2001, showing the time of arrival of those who were born outside Canada. About 160,000 of BC’s 2001 population came to Canada before 1961, and just under half of these people could be found in Greater Vancouver. The level of migration to BC was modest, by historical standards, in the 1960s, and gathered momentum in the 1970s. A much larger proportion of the immigrants who arrived in BC in the 1970s and 1980s settled in Greater Vancouver. This settlement pattern intensified in the 1990s, the decade that saw the greatest number of immigrants arrive in BC in any 10-year period, ever. Around 90 percent of the immigrants who arrived in these years could be found in Greater Vancouver in 2001. We can also see in the graph the increasing importance of several suburban municipalities of Greater Vancouver as areas of immigrant reception, particularly Burnaby, Richmond, and Surrey.

Place of birth
This graph shows the both the time of arrival and the national origin of immigrants living in Greater Vancouver in 2001. The vast majority of those who came to Canada before 1961 were from Europe; in fact more than half came from a country in the northern or western portion of that continent alone, and another quarter or so came from southern and eastern European countries. There were profound changes in Canadian immigration policy and admission systems in the 1960s, which ended a long era of European preference. Nearly half of the immigrants living in Vancouver who came in that decade were from outside of Europe, establishing a new trend in the social geography of Greater Vancouver. This proportion grew in each subsequent decade. Of the immigrants living in Greater Vancouver in 2001 who arrived in the 1996-2001 period, only around one-eighth were from European countries. In the 1990s, Eastern Asia had become the most significant source region of Vancouver’s population of newcomers.

Figures: Second generation
Of course, statistics, maps, and charts about immigrants per se do not provide a full picture of the total impact of immigrant settlement on Vancouver’s population. This larger story is told, to a degree, by the map showing the residential pattern of “second-generation immigrants” in the metropolitan area. First, note that nearly 23 percent of the Greater Vancouver population falls into this category, meaning that they were born in Canada but had at least one foreign-born parent. Without immigration, this population would not exist, at least not in Canada. As the map shows, these individuals, who were born to a pervious generation of immigrants, have tended to choose to live in suburbs, to some degree in the municipalities of the north shore, but especially in the southern portion of Metropolitan Vancouver.

Figures: Recent immigrants
These maps show the settlement pattern of the large number of immigrants who arrived in Vancouver in the 1980s and ‘90s, most of whom came from non-European source countries. The maps reveal a consistent pattern of suburbanized settlement. In the 1980s, the highest residential concentrations of new immigrants were in the eastside of the City of Vancouver and in central Richmond (which had only recently become a prime area of immigrant settlement), with Burnaby, Delta and Surrey as secondary areas. In the early 1990s, the significance of Richmond as a reception area for new immigrants grew substantially, as did the importance of a whole ring of mid-city suburbs that extended from Richmond in the south, around the parts of Surrey and Coquitlam in the east, to the north shore municipalities in the north. We also see immigrant settlement leapfrogging past the more distant suburbs of Greater Vancouver to Abbotsford. These tendencies continued their momentum in the latter half of the decade.

Figures: Visible Minority
As noted in the definition section of the atlas, the category “visible minority” has been created to include all of the residents of Canada who are neither European nor Aboriginal in origin. As seen earlier, immigrants who have arrived in Canada since the policy changes of the 1960s are the most likely to belong to this category. The map of visible minority residents in Vancouver is therefore quite similar to the map of all of the recent immigrant groups put together. All together, around 36 percent of Greater Vancouver’s population are visible minorities, and they are mainly settled in the inner-metropolitan municipality of the City of Vancouver, the middle range suburbs described earlier, and in the western half of the Abbotsford CMA. Interestingly, the percentage of visible minorities in the Census Tracts of Greater Vancouver ranges from just 1 percent to 88 percent, suggesting a pronounced tendency for these groups to avoid living in certain residential areas while concentrating in other areas.

Figures: Quotients, Place of birth
The first of these maps shows, again, the main area of immigrant settlement (in all periods), essentially as described in the map of visible minorities. However, the map of immigrants who arrived in the 1996-2001 period reveals a theme that will become familiar as we look at more specific groups: the most recent newcomers have tended to ignore the “old” immigrant core in the City of Vancouver and have settled, to a large degree, in the ring of middle-distance suburbs (and, to a lesser extent, Abbotsford).

Perhaps the most distinct sub-group of immigrants, in this series of maps, is the one born in the United Kingdom. Immigrants from this country dominated the flow of arrivals to Vancouver early in the 20th century and continued to be important well into the post-war years. Immigration from the UK fell dramatically following the 1960s, however. British immigrants are, by far, the most suburbanized group with, essentially, a donut-like pattern of settlement that has avoided the corridor anchored by Vancouver’s eastside in the west and Surrey in the south. This is also true of the small number of British immigrants who arrived in the late 1990s.

Asian immigrants have adopted a variety of settlement patterns. Those who have come to Vancouver from China, for example, live in relatively central locations. Those coming from other Chinese-speaking countries are more suburbanized in the Hong Kong-origin case, and considerably so for those born in Taiwan. These are also the only sub-groups with a strong tendency to settle in the City of Vancouver’s westside, an area of expensive homes. Immigrants from India have become associated with an entirely different settlement trajectory, with a small congregation in the South Main Street area of the City of Vancouver, and large clusters in New Westminster, Delta, and Surrey on the one hand, and Abbotsford on the other. Newcomers arriving in the 1996-2001 period have followed suit and appear to be intensifying this pattern. Those born in Iran, on the other hand, are the only visible minority group that has settled extensively in the north shore municipalities. Finally, of the sub-groups considered here, those born in the Philippines are the most spread out, with little evidence of a concentrated community centre.

The three general points to be made when looking at these maps together, are: (a) immigrants, especially those from Asian countries, tend to reside in a rather large area of Greater Vancouver, comprised of the City of Vancouver and most of the surrounding suburbs; and (b) this general point conceals very different trajectories of particular sub-groups, each of which tends to occupy a smaller segment of Greater Vancouver; and (c) some groups, however, are more residentially concentrated than others.

Figures: Quotients, Ethnicity
Some of the patterns discussed in the previous section can be better understood by examining peoples’ ethnic affiliations. This is a more complex category than place of birth. The latter is straightforward and an easy question for individuals to answer. In the census, respondents are asked to identify their ethnicity by providing a list of the cultural origins of their ancestors. This is a relatively simple issue to understand when individuals name just one group, but many provide answers that include two or more and the combinations are almost endless. For the purposes of the Atlas, the largest ethnic groups have been selected in terms of the number of individuals who specified the group exclusively or as part of a combination with other groups. For example, the group “English” used here includes those who said they are “English only” as well as those who are “English and Irish”, “English and Chinese”, etc.

Figures: Quotients, Mother tongue
As explained in the definition page of this web site, “Mother tongue” refers to the first language that a person learned that he or she still understands. The largest Mother tongue group in Vancouver, by far, is English, accounting for over 60 percent of the inhabitants of the metropolitan area. This group includes those of British ancestry as well as the children of other ethnic groups born in Canada and is therefore ethnically heterogeneous (though primarily of European cultural origin). As might be expected given the previous sections, the English Mother tongue population is highly suburbanized, especially in the outer reaches of the metropolitan region. The same is generally true of the much smaller German Mother tongue population, which is especially prevalent in the agricultural lands in the southern portion of Greater Vancouver, in Surrey, Langley, and the Abbotsford CMA. Two European groups exhibit quite different social geographies, however: the French and Italian Mother tongue populations. The former group is rather scattered, with a noticeable concentration in the inner-city area of the City of Vancouver, including Kitsilano, the Fairview Slopes, Yaletown, other parts of the Downtown, and the West End. The latter group is prominent in Burnaby and adjacent municipalities.

Among the Asian Mother tongue populations, we see that the Chinese-speaking groups are both overlapping and somewhat separate (as is the case for those born in Hong Kong vs. Taiwan). There is an unfortunate problem with these maps, however: while many respondents in the census indicated their specific dialect of Chinese (e.g., Mandarin vs. Cantonese), a large number simply gave their answer as “Chinese”, which is included in the “Chinese, n.o.s.” map (n.o.s. means not otherwise specified). In all cases, though, the Chinese language groups tend to be located in inner- or mid-metropolitan neighbourhoods. The Punjabi and Tagalog language groups are largely geographically coincident with the India- and Philippine-born populations, for obvious reasons.