Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for the family class, $13,844, for skilled workers, $14,068, and for business
immigrants, $33,046. With a typical family size at entry of 3.6 (Ley 2003),
this would mean that business immigrants had family assets of well over
$100,000 at their disposal. In fact the actual numbers were often much
larger than this, as Chapter 3 will reveal. But there is also a surprising para-
dox. Despite considerable capital at their disposal, relatively few business
immigrants were planning to work. Excluding minors and other depend-
ents, if we compare those intending to work against the standard for the
population aged 20-64, the figure is only 62 percent, considerably lower
than the level for all immigrants (76 percent), and especially for skilled
workers (85 percent). This is an enigma to which we must return.
The emphatic role of Chinese-origin groups in business immigration is
evident from LIDS. The mother tongue of 53 percent of immigrants in the
business streams was one of the Chinese dialects, led by Cantonese, the
dominant dialect of Hong Kong and adjacent parts of South China, spoken
by 32 percent. Mandarin, the dominant tongue in Taiwan and the official
language of China, followed with 17 percent. Korean, nominated by less
than 9 percent, was the fourth most common mother tongue, trailing Arabic
speakers from different nations who account for almost 10 percent of
the list. These national figures play out in significantly different ways in the
three major metropolitan areas (Table 2.2). Four East Asian states - Hong
Kong, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and South Korea -
accounted for 58 percent of all business immigrants for Toronto, 54 percent
destined for Montreal and 80 percent for Vancouver. The concentration in
Vancouver is not surprising with its Pacific Rim location, for air times to
East Asia are several hours shorter than from Toronto, while Vancouver also
offers more direct flights. The West Coast city's pre-eminence is economi-
cally significant, for if we remove the Korean numbers, we find that 72
percent of Vancouver's business immigrants are from just the three ethnic
Chinese territories of Hong Kong, Taiwan and PRC; this contrasts with
51.5 percent in Toronto and 44.5 percent in Montreal. This primacy is rel-
evant in light of Wong and Ho's (2006) finding that Chinese-origin immi-
grants have five times more income on hand at arrival than their non-Chinese
contemporaries, while Chinese business immigrants possess way above the
Chinese average. Vancouver receives a disproportionate share of wealthy
business immigrants from countries whose citizens have the highest availa-
ble economic capital to deploy.
Vancouver's share of the wealthiest immigrants is skewed further by a
second trend in the data. Typically households in the investor stream of the
BIP have the highest level of personal wealth. By 2001 they were required
to have personal assets of at least $800,000 to qualify and to stake at least
$400,000 in an investment account; while no asset figure was placed upon
entrepreneurs Vancouver managers did expect an investment of around
