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Canada has often been seen as immune from the powerful backlash against globalization and immigration that has driven political shifts elsewhere. This article challenges this belief, at least in part, by tracing the evolution of public attitudes toward immigration and analyzing the factors that have shaped the trajectory for over three decades. Drawing on nearly forty years of Environics Focus Canada surveys, combined with annual data on macro-economics and immigration flows, findings here suggest that Canadians' tolerance toward immigration responds to immigration flows and is heavily influenced by macro-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, Canada and Europe seem to be diverging dramatically in their approach to immigrant integration. While support for a multicultural approach seems to remain strong in Canada, a potent backlash pervades European debates. This paper argues that beneath the image of transatlantic divergence, there are important elements of convergence. First, the retreat from multiculturalism in Europe is more complete at the level of discourse than policy. With a few notable exceptions, multicultural policies have remained stable or even grown stronger since 2000. In many countries, new integration programs are being layered over multicultural initiatives introduced in earlier decades. Second, many of the new integration policies celebrated as evidence of a U-turn away from multiculturalism resemble programs that have long been part of immigrant integration in Canada. As a result, transatlantic convergence is indeed part of the contemporary story. However, there are also limits to this convergence. While some European countries are opting for liberal, voluntary approaches to integration, which can be combined with a multicultural approach to diversity, others are adopting more obligatory, illiberal versions of civic integration that seem inconsistent with the support for diversity central to a multicultural approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, many Western countries have implemented restrictions on immigrants' access to welfare programs, thereby creating new lines of exclusion between immigrants and the native-born. Canada is commonly seen to have resisted this trend. This view overlooks, however, that exclusion can come in different forms. In addition to direct formal exclusion from welfare programs, immigrants can also have more limited access because of indirect or informal mechanisms of differentiation. Reviewing five core welfare programs, this paper shows that direct, indirect, and informal types of exclusion exist in the Canadian welfare state, albeit with different consequences for different categories of newcomers. While this conclusion is not meant to suggest that immigrants face as much exclusion as they do in some other Western countries, it does demonstrate the need to avoid the complacency regarding immigrants' social rights in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant integration is currently a prominent issue in virtually all contemporary democracies, but countries in which the historic population itself is deeply divided - particularly those with substate nations and multiple political identities - present some interesting questions where integration is concerned. The existence of multiple and potentially competing political identities may complicate the integration process, particularly if the central government and the substate nation promote different conceptions of citizenship and different nation-building projects. What, then, are the implications of minority nationalism for immigrant integration? Are the added complexities a barrier to integration? Or do overlapping identities generate more points of contact between immigrants and their new home? This article addresses this question by probing immigrant and non-immigrant 'sense of belonging' in Canada, both inside and outside Quebec. Data come from Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Study. Our results suggest that competing nation-building projects make the integration of newcomers more, rather than less, challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widespread fear in many western nations that ethnic diversity is eroding support for the welfare state. This article examines such fears in the Canadian context. In-depth analysis of public attitudes finds remarkably little tension between ethnic diversity and public support for social programs in Canada. At first glance, then, the country seems to demonstrate the political viability of a multicultural welfare state. But this pattern reflects distinctive features of the institutional context within which public attitudes evolve. The Canadian policy regime has forestalled tension between diversity and redistribution by diverting adjustment pressures from the welfare state, absorbing some of them in other parts of the policy regime, and nurturing a more inclusive form of identity. These institutional buffers are thinning, however, potentially increasing the danger of greater tension between diversity and redistribution in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In much of the world, and particularly in Europe, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has failed, and Canada has not been immune to these rising global anxieties. A number of commentators have argued that smug complacency is blinding Canadians to growing evidence of stresses and failures in ethnic relations in their country. In this article, we explore this evolving debate. We briefly review the global backlash against multiculturalism, and why some commentators see warning signs in Canada as well. We then look at the evidence about how the multiculturalism policy in Canada operates, and about trends in immigrant integration and ethnic relations. We show that there are indeed stresses and strains within Canadian multiculturalism, with real issues that require serious attention. But we misdiagnose the problems, and their remedies, if we read the Canadian experience through the lens of the European debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a look on immigration, multiculturalism and the welfare state in Canada. The increase in ethnic diversity due to immigration poses a threat to the welfare state due to ethnic diversity's difficulty to sustain expansive social programs. Multiculturalism policies promote greater social solidarity by combating the stereotypes and stigmatizations that erode feelings of solidarity across ethnic and racial lines.