Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
available for use in Canada, usually with additional resources offshore.
7
Most
had purchased their own houses, typically valued at the time of interview at
over $500,000 and sometimes over $1 million. These figures are considerably
higher than Canada-wide data on business immigrant assets at the time of
landing reported by Wong and Ho (2006), and give some sense of the wealth
premium enjoyed by business immigrants in Vancouver. In an earlier round
of interviews with a smaller sample from East Asia, respondents stated that
they had brought funds with them that ranged from $500,000 to $5 million
(Ley 1999), while Edward Woo's estimate of household expenditures for
business immigrants over a three-year period amounted to approximately
$600,000 for a house, cars, and household expenditures (Woo 1998). The
full scale of available capital for deployment is unknowable, but the best evi-
dence comes from data in the possession of CIC, derived from interviews
with business immigrants outside Canada during the visa application proc-
ess. Part of the application requires potential business immigrants to prove
the scale of their financial capital through verified documentation, a far more
rigorous test than a research interview. The data, subsequently retrieved by
the Province of British Columbia, show 'total funds' available to applicants,
defined as 'total money declared by the immigrants during the application
process. They do not necessarily represent the net worth of the immigrants,
or money to be brought into B.C. by the immigrants' (Government of British
Columbia 1997). Money of course provides an incomplete dossier of assets
but it does offer some insight into the scale of available liquid assets.
Records for the four years from 1994-97 show that during this period 70
percent of business applicants to BC had permanent residence in Hong
Kong or Taiwan, with South Korea in third rank. Among applicants to the
entrepreneur stream from all countries, the 'total funds' declared to overseas
immigration officials ranged from an annual average of $1.62 million per
household in 1994 to $1.20 million in 1997. For investors, numbers were
considerably higher, fluctuating between a mean level of $2.47 million in
1994 and $2.22 million in 1996. The scale of this financial capital available
for transfer from Hong Kong and Taiwan alone to British Columbia is
extraordinary, reaching $3.49 billion for the entrepreneur stream and $5.77
billion for the investor track, or a total of over $9 billion over the four years.
But this is only a fraction of the overall embodied wealth available to reach
the shores of BC through the BIP since 1980. It does not include the smaller
self-employed business stream, reserved for the wealthiest applicants, not
does it represent the busy years of landings in the early 1990s. Nor of course
does it include business migrants from other countries of origin. By using the
1994-97 data as a standard we can extrapolate over a longer period to gain a
fuller approximation of 'total funds' available for use by business immigrants.
Using a conservative measure, the smallest annual record during 1994-97 of
average total funds, $1.20 million for entrepreneurs and $2.22 million for
