Quality of Life of Immigrants: Integration Experiences among Asian Immigrants in Saskatoon

Abstract

Saskatoon, one of Canada’s fastest growing cities, has attracted and retained a great number of Asian immigrants in recent years, a trend particularly notable because of the city’s historically low immigration retention and absence of ethnic enclaves. Committed to engaged scholarship, the Community-University Institute for Social Research and the Open Door Society, a newcomer settlement agency in Saskatoon, collaborated on this qualitative study, working together to hear from immigrants and document what they identified as barriers to and facilitators of their Quality of Life (QoL) in the city. In particular, in their discussion of QoL and its determinants, recent and established first generation Asian immigrants in Saskatoon presented in this study related their perceptions of quality of life to neighbourhood resources, sense of belonging in the community, and social comfort (social reception). Furthermore, most of the immigrants of this study showed strong determination to integrate into the mainstream, which they believed would bring them and their children better quality of life in Canada. Three key themes emerged: educational access and opportunity, socio-economic and socio-cultural factors, and reception of the local neighbourhood to recent immigrants. This study sheds light on the perspectives of Asian immigrants settling in a Canadian mid-sized city that remains without ethnic enclaves.

Keywords

• Asian immigrants
• quality of life
• Prairies
• ethnic enclaves
• immigrant integration