She and other scholars have found that those with a decent chance of attracting and keepingimmigrants are the ones with universities, colleges or teaching hospitals. There’s very littleinflux to cities without post-secondary education. So Hamilton (home to a university, a teachinghospital and two colleges) and Kitchener-Waterloo (two universities and a college) have donewell – especially because immigrants tend to seek home ownership at high rates and find housesincreasingly less affordable in big cities. A smaller place with a campus hits the sweet spot.“The role of the university is a really interesting one,” Dr. Walton-Roberts says. “As we weredoing the research into second-tier cities and interviewing new immigrants, what came out wasthis interesting intersection between new immigrants who were also students.”A similar phenomenon is taking place south of the border. Neil Ruiz, a scholar with theWashington-based Brookings Institution, has found that the rust-belt cities of the northern U.S.that have avoided disaster since the factories shut down also are the ones with universities,because foreign students are the only group interested in settling. Some, such as Cleveland, havecast a wide net, setting up active immigration policies, including offices in foreign capitals, butonly the students come.The phenomenon is much larger in Canada, in part because Canadian policy allows student-visaimmigrants to stick around after graduation, usually for as long as they’ve spent studying, andseek employment or start a business.There’s a largely unnoticed trend behind this: Increasingly, immigrants to Canada are trying touse student visas as their way in. Because Ottawa is giving priority to post-secondary studentvisas as its favoured immigrant class, and because universities are bulking up abroad tocompensate for a domestic enrolment slump, and because university towns such as Waterloo andHamilton are pushing to attract immigrants, the student visa is seen as a golden ticket.“We’ve identified this parallel process,” Dr. Walton-Roberts says, “of people applying to cometo Canada to study at the same time as they were applying for immigrant status, and they wereaware of the fact that finding a job and having your credentials recognized was somewhatdifficult for immigrants to Canada.“So they thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to come, we’re going to study, we’ll have a Canadiancredential and then, if we get status, we can be ready to get into the labour market with aCanadian credential.”And immigrant-heavy districts like Riverdale have become central to this phenomenon. As in bigcities, smaller places find that formerly working-class neighbourhoods outside their core areashave become focal points for new Canadians.McMaster geographer Richard Harris and his team recently published a report, NeighbourhodChange in Hamilton since 1970, which shows that the landing pads for immigration have shifteddramatically from the downtown districts around the steel mills to the low-cost housingneighbourhoods on the edge of town – taking with them the focus of poverty (for newimmigrants, even with university credentials, start out quite poor).17
This shows the new reality of immigrants: They aren’t industrial workers (although many stillwind up in blue-collar work) but students, service workers, entrepreneurs and smallbusinesspeople. They settle in places like Riverdale to have fellow immigrants around them formutual support. But their dependence on more precarious forms of employment and risky smallbusinessventures means they also need help with education and social services to make theirstart.The heartbreaking experience of seeing families lose their life savings in marginal businessgambles, says Hamilton’s Mr. Murray, was one reason the city published new-business advicebooklets in several languages and created a network to help immigrants with startups.The smaller cities don’t offer the huge clusters of fellow expats who can help in the larger cities.But they are more stable and affordable.“What’s different here is that most people want to stay,” says Mr.Yazdani, as he walks brisklyhome from the bus after a day of work.“It’s not perfect, but it’s more of a tight-knit community than I had in Toronto. It’s a smallerplace, but it feels like home.”18
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