Does Toronto have fewer expats/temporary residents relative to many "global" cities?

[wild goose chase]

One thing I get the impression of is that many global cities that are called "cosmopolitan" like New York, London etc. not only have a large foreign-born population who are local citizens, but also have a large share of residents who are short-term residents (eg. they may be transient, coming from other parts of the country, or internationally to live there but not intending to stay, such as EU citizens for the UK, expats, temporary or contract workers, international students etc), not to mention people temporarily visiting like tourists.

Toronto however seems to attract a lot of people from overseas who really seem to make it their home for the long haul, not temporarily. In many cities, the foreign born is likely to be an expat or non-permanent resident, not a landed immigrant/citizen but in Toronto, most of the foreign-born are long-term immigrants. I knew many international students growing up in Toronto who, if I still keep in contact with them, I notice, still live in Toronto, and who eventually became citizens, married someone in the city, starting a family and settling down here. Whereas many international students in the US often leave after their schooling is done. Also I much less rarely meet expats in Toronto in the sense of people who are only here to work and will be gone in a few years, or people who are only here because a foreign company hired them to be here.

Is my impression accurate (or maybe more a reflection of the crowd I hang around, not the city as a whole)?

 

[King of Kensington]

It seems to, but I have no hard data.

 

[wild goose chase]

I partly thought of this question from reflecting on the fact that in the US, in media and politics sometimes the concept of a guest worker/temporary worker is conflated with the term "immigrant", as in the debates.
Now it's true that the US has a much larger undocumented worker population than Canada, but the usage of the term still seems different to me. When I visualize "immigrant", the images that come to mind are those like a small business shopkeeper that serves a local community, a kid presenting "my family's immigrant roots" in a class project and partaking in a multicultural potluck, a grandma taking ESL classes at the local library, rather than a non-citizen seasonal farm worker or a person on a H-1B visa whose ability to stay in the country is at the mercy of his/her employer.

Growing up in Toronto, I would never have thought of calling a temporary worker/expat an "immigrant" since the term evokes a much more permanently settled (or at least intention to settle) connotation to me. To me, the term "immigrant" evokes the image of a person who had been born elsewhere and perhaps spent a significant part of life abroad but now calls Canada home and intends it to be in the long-term, not one who is only here for a few years to work and then leaves back to his/her country right afterward.

 

[wild goose chase]

Just found some stats here. It does look like, as my impression suggests, that immigrants (which includes permanent residents in addition to citizens) outnumber temporary residents considerably. 54,610 people are classified as temporary resident in 2006, and it seems like in terms of breakdown of non-visitor temporary resident entries in 2011, it's split between workers and students as shown on p. 25 of the document. As shown on p. 27, the international students are mainly from Asia, with the largest source of foreign workers being Americans.

http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2013/cd/bgrd/backgroundfile-55335.pdf

 

[wild goose chase]

It may be a rough measure, but I'd imagine one way to look at it is how much of the foreign-born has already become citizens by comparing the relative proportion of non-citizens in a city to the foreign-born in a city as a whole, assuming the native-born are citizens at birth and the foreign-born aren't but can acquire it (though to be fair, in theory, one can be native-born and give up citizenship, etc. so it's not exact).

I was reading about New York City considering allowing non-citizens the legal right to vote in local elections, and it was mentioned that 1.3 million adult New Yorkers are non-citizen, and New York City has 3.07 million foreign born. So about 1.3/3.07 or 42% of the foreign born adults are non-citizen, and I'd assume it would be more with those under 18 included.

Now, for Toronto, there are 380, 000 non-citizens, which is about 30% of the foreign born population of our city.

The US seems to have a higher proportion of foreign-born who are non-citizens as a whole -- 7% of those in the US as a whole are non-citizens, comparable to 6% for Canada, even though we have a 20% foreign-born population compared to 13% for the US. In many of the US states it seems like non-citizen foreign-born outnumber those who are citizens and foreign-born.

When it comes to London in the UK, this isn't citizenship per se but this source, states: In 2011, 46% of the non-UK born population held a UK passport, and 52% held only a non-UK passport. The rest (2%) held no passport.

This seems to suggest maybe about half of the foreign-born London might be more permanently settled immigrants versus more temporary ones perhaps.

Now, that's not the complete story (since it doesn't account for the fact that many of the non-citizens are in the process of becoming citizens and might want to stay permanently, or that those that obtain citizenship aren't necessarily going to intend to stay permanently -- I mean, consider the "Canadians of convenience" accusation given to some immigrants a while back) but I still stand by my original observation that Toronto does seem to be a city whose migrants are more often settler than sojourner.