Recent immigration and the formation of visible minority neighbourhoods in Canada’s large cities

This study examines the expansion of visible minority neighbourhoods in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas. Minority neighbourhoods, defined as census tracts with over 30% of their population from a single visible minority group, increased in number from 6 to 254 between 1981 and 2001. Most of these neighbourhoods were formed through a partial replacement of nonvisible minority residents by visible minority group members. However, there was no evidence that the partial replacement would lead to an exclusive occupancy of some neighbourhoods by one visible minority group. The emergence of minority neighbourhoods was associated more with a large increase in minority groups’ share of the city population from immigration than with an increase in their tendency to concentrate in particular neighbourhoods. Visible minority immigrants arriving in the 1980s and 1990s were more residentially concentrated than earlier arrivals, and their level of concentration remained stable with time living in Canada. Overall, large visible minority groups were not as concentrated as were Blacks in large U.S. cities or as some non-visible minority groups were in the earlier decades in Canada.