Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
children who return as postgraduates were not short-term visa students
resident in North America only for the period of their degree programme.
Instead they are typically part of the 1.5 generation who migrated with
family members earlier in their lives, and completed secondary school and
university education in Canada. Normally they have secured citizenship
and speak excellent English with little or no discernible accent. Their identi-
ties are both Canadian and East Asian. Second, they are transnational rather
than return migrants and there is no certainty that the trip back to East Asia
will be their last move.
A number of variations exist in family strategies as return is contem-
plated. In New Zealand, Ho and Bedford (2008) have noted that while
astronaut families have frequently re-united in Asia (usually to work) or in
New Zealand (often to retire) their 1.5 generation children have moved
either back to the homeland or onwards to a third nation. We can identify
the following family strategies among the overseas Chinese in Canada.
The working settler model
This conventional scenario has been the experience of possibly a majority
of East Asian immigrants. Despite the high number of returnees, the 2006
census shows the existence of 218,815 Hong Kong-born migrants and
68,225 Taiwanese still living in Canada. Not all of them of course are long-
term stayers and some are fragmented transnational families. As we saw in
Chapter 4, the economic circumstances of immigrants among the ethnic
Chinese population in Canada have been poor. Tax returns in 2000 showed
average incomes of $15,000, half the average for the entire population
(Wang and Lo 2005). Business immigrants reported even lower returns
around $13,000, with many households declaring incomes below the offi-
cial poverty line. One problem has been the miserable financial returns pro-
vided by the niche market in the large Chinese-Canadian enclave economies
in Toronto and Vancouver. In these settings, where success is quickly imi-
tated, relentless hyper-competition drives down profit margins and contrib-
utes to business failure.
Retirement
Business immigrants are older at the time of arrival because of the require-
ment that they amass significant entrepreneurial experience in their home
country as a condition of entry through the Business Immigration
Programme. The mean age of parents in the characteristically four-person
nuclear family in the BIP was typically between 40 and 54 years. Among the
