If you guessed Toronto, you wouldn’t be wrong.

The Toronto met­ro­pol­i­tan area, with a regional pop­u­la­tion of more than 5 mil­lion, is home to roughly 2.3 mil­lion peo­ple who were born out­side of Canada.

But you might be sur­prised to learn that the Vancouver sub­urb of Richmond is the city with the high­est per­cent­age of immi­grant res­i­dents.

According to Richmond’s most recent cen­sus (2006), “Immigrants make up 57.4% of the city’s pop­u­la­tion, which is the high­est pro­por­tion of any munic­i­pal­ity in Canada.” The immi­grant pop­u­la­tion of Greater Toronto is just under 50% of the region’s total population.

More than 80 per­cent of immi­grants to Richmond come from Asia and the Middle East, par­tic­u­larly China (26.8%) and Hong Kong (23%). Just over 10 per­cent come from Europe (espe­cially the UK), with another five per­cent hail­ing from the Americas or else­where in the world.

Interestingly, a sig­nif­i­cant major­ity of Richmond’s immi­grants have been in Canada long enough to have been granted Canadian cit­i­zen­ship. More than 86% of Richmond res­i­dents are Canadian citizens.

Across Canada, about 20 per­cent of Canadian res­i­dents were born out­side the coun­try, approx­i­mately one out of every five peo­ple. In the U.S., in con­trast, immi­grants make up only about 12 per­cent of the population.

Photo ©Carolyn B. Heller