América del Norte

Canada, which has traditionally welcomed immigrants, has remained strongly proimmi gration.This is reflected in policies mandating comparatively high immigration levels and in the fact that public opinion generally supports it.Clearly this makes the country an exception to prevailing attitudes about this issue across most in dustrial nations, attitudes that have received much attention, particularly in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and the Netherlands.This "Canadian exceptio nalism" on immigration is reflected in cross-national comparisons of public opinion, most recently by the German Marshall Fund (2010, 7), which also indicated that Canadians were more likely to see immigration as an opportunity than as a problem.What accounts for the generally quite positive Canadian approach to this issue?Why have anti-immigrant views such as have been seen in other countries not become more prominent in Canada?Are there indications that Canadian attitudes might turn in a more negative direction in the future?To address these questions, this chapter examines available Canadian public opinion data, including a recent national opinion survey, to attempt to clarify the social roots of popular support for high immigra tion levels in Canada.Canadian immigration levels, strong throughout the nation's history, have been particularly high for the past 20 years, when Canada has received about 250 000 permanent immigrants annually, representing between 0.7 and 0.8 percent of the total population.As a result of relatively high immigration, the Canadian po pulation has a substantially greater foreign-born component compared to the United States and most European countries (United Nations 2006).Much of this immigra tion has been concentrated in the major cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Van couver, and in the recent period, Toronto alone has received nearly100 000 new immigrants each year, making it one of the world's most immigrant-intensive large cities.In this context of high immigration, it is particularly remarkable that there has been such widespread acceptance of and support for it in Canada, with relatively little of the acrimonious debate seen elsewhere.Public opinion polls show that almost

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