Filipinos top new immigrant groups in Alberta

Alberta, Canada 

Statistics Canada: 47,600 Filipinos moved to Alberta from 2016-2021

 

By Charmaine Y. Rodriguez

Filipino immigrants are the biggest group of newcomers who moved to Alberta, Canada, making up about one quarter of recent immigrants to the province.

Statistics Canada data shows about 47,600 people moved to Alberta from the Philippines since 2016. 

As of 2021, more than three in five recent immigrants — those who arrived in Alberta within the last five years — came from Asia, particularly the Philippines and India.

About 31,800 people immigrated to the province from India in the same period, making up about 16 per cent of recent immigrants.

Table of Data on Immigrants in Alberta from cbc.ca

The trends in terms of where people are coming from align with what the immigration sector is seeing, Sarosh Rizvi, executive director of the Alberta Association of Immigrant Serving Agencies, told cbc.ca. 

Like the trend in Calgary, about 23 per cent of the population or about 8.3 million people in Canada are immigrants—the largest share of the population in over 150 years. 

According to the census, the Calgary area has the third-highest proportion of immigrants among the country’s urban areas. Nearly one in three people living in the Calgary census metropolitan area is an immigrant.

In Edmonton, more than one in four people in the census area is an immigrant — the fifth-highest proportion of Canada’s large urban centres.

However, the immigration data in Alberta has decreased overall.  

Census data shows that 193,175 people immigrated to Alberta from 2016 to 2021. The figures is about 14,600 lower compared to the nearly 207,800 people who arrived in Alberta between 2011 and 2016.

“(The COVID-19 pandemic) had an impact on it, but I think it’s bigger than COVID,” Rizvi also said in the same report. “We were seeing that trend pre-COVID, where the relative numbers in Alberta were decreasing compared to where they were.”

The decrease in immigration over the last five years likely had to do with slower economic recovery in Alberta, as newcomers were less likely to find work, he also added. 

With the immigration trend, more than one in four Albertans are now persons of colour.

About 1.16 million people identified as a person of colour in Alberta in 2021, an increase of around 228,300 people — or about a quarter— since 2016.

About three in four people of colour in the province are South Asian (which includes those from India and Afghanistan), Filipino, Black, or Chinese, data shows. 

The number of South Asians grew the most compared to other groups, increasing by nearly 67,000 people to about 297,700 in 2021 from 2016.

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