Migration and Resilience in Urban Canada: Why Social Resilience, Why Now?

Drawing on an extensive review of recent literature about resilience and integration, this paper evaluates a social resilience approach to the integration of international migrants in Canadian cities. We advocate a social resilience approach that acknowledges how institutions of all types play critical roles in newcomers’ efforts to establish their lives in new places, especially when faced with unanticipated events such as a global pandemic. Centering research around the concept of social resilience goes beyond the neoliberal idea that integration is primarily an individual affair achieved with support from friends, family, and a nebulous community and draws attention to the social diversity of migrants and the complexity of their migration and settlement histories. Inherently relational, a social resilience approach encourages comparative studies of integration across cities that can reveal how different institutions and their programs affect migrants’ trajectories. Detailed examinations of local institutions and their responses to shifting selection and integration policies, especially during a pandemic, also hold the potential to provide crucial information for supporting newcomers effectively.