Immigration study is uniting community

The government is spending Can$8 million to examine how immigrants from very different backgrounds and countries integrate into society Does being part of a church congregation make integration into Montreal any easier for an Haitian immigrant? Does a highly educated new Canadian feel more welcome than one who has arrived as a labourer? How does Calgary, home of the famous stampede, feel to a transplanted African?

Questions such as these are being asked by hundreds of Canadian researchers in an experimental project called Metropolis.

Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the federal government are spending Can$8 million (Pounds 3.4 million) over six years to study what it means to be an immigrant in Canada. The project, which began in December 1995, is part of an international initiative examining the impact of immigration on cities.

For Canada's part, it has become a wide web of research. Centred on four cities, it then spreads out to topics ranging from education and religion to the impact of immigration on the economy, housing and the health-care system.

Researchers are being asked to not only work with other academics but also with government, community groups and non-governmental organisations, all with the aim of trying to improve the country's immigration and settlement policies.

"Metropolis is trying to go beyond the old model, whereby research is produced then digested by intermediaries and fed to policy-makers," says SSHRC's Denis Croux.

"Metropolis is a remarkable invention," Morton Beiser, director of the Toronto centre, told the Canadian magazine University Affairs. "It is trying to do something for which there are no templates and few guidelines."

He says governments, universities and community groups are not accustomed to working with each other. Governments tend to seek control, universities want autonomy, and community groups are usually adversarial. Yet they are brought together for Metropolis.

Aside from some differences on research priorities and the frustration, for some, that the federal government is getting the minds of academics but offering nothing towards the costs of overheads (the researchers must go to their usual funders), the experiment seems to be running well.

Ratna Ghosh, dean of education at McGill University in Montreal and a Metropolis researcher for the Montreal centre, has seen much cross-pollination taking place.

"Metropolis is more than the sum of its parts because of this interaction," says Dean Ghosh, the author of Redefining Multicultural Education.

"Researchers tend to work in isolation. This is getting us in touch with real people," she adds.

Dean Ghosh, who immigrated to Canada 20 years ago, says her assignment - assessing multicultural training and education - raises a complex question in Quebec, where the need for protecting the French language can sometimes collide with an immigrant's need to have his or her culture respected.