Canada Immigration

Residing and working in Canada is the dream of people from all over the world. Canada welcomes thousands of legal immigrants each year coming from differnt parts of the world.

Immigration to Canada is the process defined by Canadian government by which people from all over the world migrate to Canada to reside permanently in the country. Many of them, but not all, become citizens of Canada after a specific period of time.

People have been migrating to the geographic area of Canada for hundreds of years, though ways of immigration to Canada varying time to time. After 1947, domestic immigration law of Canada went through a lot of major changes, most remarkably with the Immigration Act of Canada 1976, and the current Immigration and Refugee Protection Act of Canada from 2002.

There are three categories of immigrants in Canada:
1. Family class (Blood relatives of Canadian permanent residents or Canadian citizens)
2. Independent immigrants (Immigrated on the basis of skill, capital and labor-market requirements)
3. Refugees.

At present, Canada is known as a country with an extensive immigration policy which is reflected in Canada's ethnic multiplicity. As per the 2001 census by Statistics Canada, Canada has 34 main ethnic groups with at least one hundred thousand members each, of which 10 ethnic groups have over 1,000,000 people and many others represented in smaller amounts.

Among ethnic groups of Canada, 16.2% of the population belonged to noticeable minorities: most noticeable among these are South Asian (4.0% of the population), Chinese (3.9%), Black (2.5%), and Filipino (1.1%). Other minorities are Irish (13.94%), German (10.18%) and Italian (4.63%), with 3.87% claiming Ukrainian origin 3.87% claiming Dutch origin and 3.15% claiming Polish origin.

Every year, Canada maintains a target of 250,000 immigrants from all over the world. In 2007, Canada received a total of 236,760 immigrants from all over the world. Among these, the top ten sending countries were; People's Republic of China (28,896), India (28,520), Philippines (19,718), Pakistan (9,808), United States (8,750), United Kingdom (7,324), Iran (7,195), South Korea (5,909), Sri Lanka (4,068) and Colombia (5,382).

The top ten source countries were followed narrowly by France (4,026), and Morocco (4,025), with Romania, Russia and Algeria, each of them contributing approx 3,500 immigrants.

The author of this article has made a Canada Immigration Blog in order to guide all those people who want to immigrate to Canada. The major focus of the author is to fight against fake immigration consultants.