Immigration to Canada
Immigration to Canada is the process by which people migrate to Canada to reside in that country. The majority of these individuals become Canadian citizens. After 1947, domestic immigration law and policy went through major changes, most notably with the Immigration Act, 1976, and the current Immigration and Refugee Protection Act from 2002. Canadian immigration policies are still evolving. As recently as 2008, Citizenship and Immigration Canada has made significant changes to streamline the steady flow of immigrants. Those changes included reduced professional categories for skilled immigration as well as caps for immigrants in various categories. In the year from July 2015 to June 2016, there were 320,932 immigrants to Canada.
In Canada there are four categories of immigrants: family class (closely related persons of Canadian residents living in Canada), economic immigrants (skilled workers and business people), other (people accepted as immigrants for humanitarian or compassionate reasons) and refugees (people who are escaping persecution, torture or cruel and unusual punishment). According to the 2001 census by Statistics Canada, Canada has 33 ethnic groups with at least one hundred thousand members each, of which 10 have over 1,000,000 people and numerous others represented in smaller amounts. 16.2% of the population belonged to visible minorities.
The Canadian public, as well as the major political parties, support either sustaining or increasing the current level of immigration. A 2014 sociological study concluded that "Australia and Canada are the most receptive to immigration among western nations".
After the initial period of British and French colonization, four major waves (or peaks) of immigration and settlement of non-aboriginal peoples took place over a period of almost two centuries. The fifth wave is currently occurring.
The first wave of significant, non-aboriginal immigration to Canada occurred over almost two centuries with slow but progressive French settlement of Quebec and Acadia with smaller numbers of American and European entrepreneurs in addition to British military personnel. This wave culminated with the influx of 46–50,000 British Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, chiefly from the Mid-Atlantic States mostly into what is today Southern Ontario, the Eastern Townships of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. A second wave of 30,000 Americans settled in Ontario and the Eastern Townships between the late 1780s and 1812 with promises of land. Scottish Highlanders from land clearances also became landers in Canada during this period. It marked a new age for Canada and its people.
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