Nearly 48,000 Filipinos moved to Alberta, Canada from 2016 to 2021

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. CHANGE.ORG

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 have 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 percent of recent immigrants.

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 percent 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 are immigrants — the fifth-highest proportion of Canada’s large urban centers.

However, the immigration data in Alberta has decreased overall.

Census data shows that 193,175 people immigrated to Alberta from 2016 to 2021. The figure 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 color.

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

About three in four people of color in the province are South Asian (which include 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.