Season 3, Ep. 9: Beyond the Big City

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Kelly, M., & Nguyen, M. (2023). Choosing to stay: Understanding immigrant retention in four non-metropolitan counties in southern Ontario. (external link) Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24(Suppl 6), 1055-1075.

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Transcript

Maggie Perzyna

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, a podcast that explores innovative migration research and connects the dots to real world impacts. This series is produced by CERC Migration in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. I'm Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Today, we're shifting our focus away from the towering skylines of major cities to explore an often overlooked story, the attraction and retention of newcomers in small and mid-sized cities. From Canada to Australia to New Zealand, these regions are playing a crucial role in national strategies to counter depopulation and drive regional growth. Yet they face unique challenges and opportunities in welcoming newcomers, fostering integration and building thriving communities. In this episode, two researchers will join us to explore the findings from groundbreaking research projects that are trying to understand the complexities of attracting immigrants beyond the big city. But first, let's take a trip to Pictou County, a small community in Nova Scotia on Canada's east coast. Back in 1773 it was the landing spot for the first immigrant ship from Scotland, and now more than 250 years later, the people there are working hard to make sure it remains a welcoming home for newcomers.

Sarah Wiseman

When the photo of two-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi washing up on the shores hit our headlines here in Canada, I just kind of stopped. And I guess up to that point, I'd always been really purposeful in my volunteer work, being local faced, being community focused.

Maggie Perzyna

Meet Sarah Wiseman.

Sarah Wiseman

And when I saw that photo, it just struck me. I had two young kids at home at the time, and I realized there's space in our backyard for others as well, and maybe we could find a way to do some volunteer work that was actually welcoming others into our wonderful little community.

Maggie Perzyna

Sarah was born in Pictou County in northern Nova Scotia. She built a career as a labour and employment lawyer, never expecting to work in immigration or refugee support. But in 2015 as millions of Syrians fled the Civil War, she felt compelled to step in and help.

Sarah Wiseman

I was part of a local volunteer initiative that started a community sponsorship group called Pictou County Safe Harbour. Here in Pictou County, we've got a grand total population of just over 40,000, I think, maybe 45,000 and within 48 hours of creating a Facebook page inviting community members to get engaged in this, we had 700 people sign up.

Maggie Perzyna

The community was ready to help, but that was pretty much all they had. Unlike big cities like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, Pictou County didn't have the infrastructure to support newcomers or the resources and services they'd need to settle in.

Sarah Wiseman

Yeah, at the time, in 2015 I would describe myself as completely naive and ignorant to what existed within the settlement frameworks, both formally and informally, federally and provincially. And so, I think for us as a community collective, it was really quite a learning experience.

Maggie Perzyna

So Sarah, working as a volunteer for the Pictou County Safe Harbour Group, went straight to the provincial immigration department, asking how communities like hers could help welcome refugees.

Sarah Wiseman

You know, at the time, we didn't have public transit systems. We didn't have a local mosque, for example, at the time, but there was a real community desire to find creative and very personalized ways to be welcoming. So, when I look at where we were nine years ago or now, actually, we're almost 10 years in. It's really been quite an exciting building of infrastructure and services around that.

Maggie Perzyna

When Sarah found out that a Syrian family was coming to Pictou County, she turned to the only person she knew who had been through a similar experience.

Sarah Wiseman

Interestingly, I had heard Tareq Hadhad, who you might have heard of with peace by chocolate, had arrived a couple of months before that, and the community he was settled in, Antigonish, is only about 30 minutes down the road from Pictou County. And so, I reached out to Tarek, and I said, look, I heard your story, I know Syria is a really big country. With a big population, so the chances of you knowing this family is really small, but I said, here's the family name. In the off chance you've got any connection, and you want to let them know where they're coming. He said, leave it with me for an hour, Sarah, he called me back. I kid you not, he had spoken to someone who recognized the region that the family name would be from. They made a few calls, and they connected with the family we were sponsoring in, who, at the time, were still in Zaatari refugee camp. So, Tarek was able to have a call with the family and say, I just want to let you know you're coming to a place in northern Nova Scotia, I've been in touch with the community. It's freezing cold, but the welcome will be very warm.

Maggie Perzyna

So, when the first Syrian family arrived in the middle of a snowy February in 2016 Pictou County, was more than ready to help, maybe even a little too ready.

Sarah Wiseman

On the day they arrived, it was a sunny afternoon, and it happened to be the day following one of those big ice storms. And so, all of the branches of the trees were encased in ice, which was both, I think, very frightening for them, probably, but also quite beautiful and glistening. They took it all in stride. I think, when they arrived here in community, and we're still quite close with this family now, so we've had lots of opportunity to speak about it over the years, they were overwhelmed with attention and love and welcome, to a point that we actually had to be quite careful about making sure that they had privacy, that they were uninterrupted as well.

Maggie Perzyna

At first glance, moving to a small rural town instead of a big city might seem like a disadvantage for a newcomer family, but Sarah believes that being part of a close-knit community can actually create a more personal and meaningful experience. She saw this firsthand when she made the jump from corporate law to becoming the CEO of Pictou County Regional Enterprise Network, her local development office.

Sarah Wiseman

What we lack in like mass public transit or really large faith-based diaspora, we make up for in personal casserole delivery and drives to the soccer practices on school afternoon. So, yeah, there's, there's a real opportunity for very personal engagement in that level of welcome that happens. And I think those are the sticking factors, right, especially whether people come here for resettlement or for job relocation, especially when you're looking at jobs, a job is a job is a job. That's one piece. But what makes people call a community home is the experience their family has as a whole, that other kind of soft, informal connections.

Maggie Perzyna

And when a member of that first Syrian family recently experienced racism, the people of Pictou County came together, speaking out and showing their support.

Sarah Wiseman

We made a Facebook post. We didn't name the business, we didn't get into the details of the incident. We just said, look, something has happened, and it's unfortunate, and we don't feel that it reflects our community as a whole. If you want to show your support as well for immigrant welcome and making our community a welcome place, here's what you can do. And so, Rania, her last name is Almethyb. She and her husband Bassam, own a restaurant called Maple Cedar, the Syrian kitchen. And so, they set up a poster board in their restaurant, with the support of the local economic development office, the Pictou County Partnership, and we said, look, you can go in. You don't have to buy anything, just sign a message of welcome and newcomer support on the wall, and your name will be entered into a draw for a gift certificate. Within 48 hours. Again, the power of Facebook and social media sometimes can be used for good in small communities. Within a few days, we had more than 20 local businesses making donations of gift cards and certificates to this initiative. The restaurant was absolutely flooded and overwhelmed with people stopping in and giving messages of support or giving Rania a hug. And so really quickly, we saw again, it's not that that negative incident didn't happen, and it's not that people who are anti-immigration are not out there, but there are also a lot of people who will jump at the chance in small community to really voice the counter narrative and be supportive.

Maggie Perzyna

Sarah says that to her surprise, Pictou County has even been the relocation choice for some refugees who, in fact, did arrive in the big city.

Sarah Wiseman

We've got a local family here that were former refugees originally from Rwanda, have been living in Kenya for many decades, and the eldest sister in that family was awarded a scholarship through WUSC,World University Services Canada. So, she was the first family member to move to Canada. 13 years in Toronto, when later her sister moved to Nova Scotia, to Pictou County through a refugee labour mobility pathway, and so she moved to become a nurse in our local healthcare system. I looked at that scenario knowing that sister number two was moving to our rural community, and her older sister had already been in Toronto for many years. I figured there was a good chance that sister number two might move to Toronto to join her older sister. In fact, the opposite happened, and so within three months of the second sister being here in Pictou County, the older sister joined her here.

Maggie Perzyna

Even though Toronto has more services, more people and more bus routes for that eldest sister, what it lacked was a true sense of community, the feeling of home.

Sarah Wiseman

It's exactly that. It's the social capital and social support that softly helps you to access and figure out services, they found so much more accessible in the smaller community environment that sister number one said she had gone years and years without tending to some of these kind of red tape, paperwork things she needed to do, even though she knew physically where the buildings were that she had to go. But she said, within a week of living in small community in Nova Scotia, she got done what she hadn't done in 10 years in Toronto.

Maggie Perzyna

Sarah says the Pictou County's ability to provide more tailored and dedicated support to refugees is, in large part, thanks to their aging population, something that is often framed in a negative light.

Sarah Wiseman

In rural communities, where we often see aging populations and aging demographics and a higher number of retirees. That's not entirely a bad thing. In our community's case, that's meant there's a really fabulous pool of retirees who are looking for meaningful, purpose filled ways to give of their time and get engaged in the community. And so, we've used the, what some people have called the 'silver tsunami', to our benefit when it comes to making this a very welcoming community.

Maggie Perzyna

Now, almost 10 years after that, first family arrived, Sarah says that newcomers have been a crucial part of Pictou County's growth. There are several different local organizations in place to help with every aspect of their settlement, from their first days of arrival to the full integration of their family into the community.

Sarah Wiseman

There's no question that in our local communities, we have challenges with access to health care, with affordable housing. We have a lot of people who live here in our communities already, who are Canadian, born and raised, who need additional supports. But the reality is that immigration is a part of the solution. It's not the only solution to those things, but it is through welcoming newcomers to our communities that we can bring in more healthcare workers, that we can bring in people who can help us build more affordable housing and grow our social support systems.

Maggie Perzyna

And while Sarah is no longer the CEO of the Pictou County Regional Enterprise Network, the work she did to help welcome refugees to her hometown has changed her career path forever. She's now the Director of all Canadian activities within the Shapiro Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports migrants, refugees and other vulnerable populations through grants and funding.

Sarah Wiseman

Back in 2019 when our community first piloted the Economic Mobility Pathway Program, we brought them to the town of Pictou, where there's a replica of the ship Hector, and that is the ship that 251 years ago, if I have my math right, brought my ancestors over from Scotland, and that's a ship that arrived much later in the season than it expected to. It was all out of food. Folks on the ship were not doing well, and the story goes that they survived that first winter because they were welcomed by the local, First Nation community, by the Mi'kmaq community that was here. And that is full circle. We are newcomers here as welcome, just not as recently as some of those that we've welcomed over the last number of years. But I think that sense of welcome runs really deep in our history and in our roots, and I hope it's one that will be able to sustain even through these very politically divisive times.

Maggie Perzyna

Sarah Wiseman is the director of the Canadian branch of the Shapiro Foundation. Many thanks to her for sharing her insights on building welcoming communities, the power of local engagement and the role of immigration in strengthening rural Canada. Joining us today to look at regional migration dynamics are Dr Aude Bernard and Dr Melissa Kelly. Aude is a senior lecturer at the School of the Environment at the University of Queensland in Australia. She's a demographer specializing in internal migration and population mobility and the principal investigator of Where Migrants Go, a study of immigrants post arrival moves in Australia, funded by the Australian Research Council. Melissa is a Senior Research Associate and Mentorship Program Lead at CERC Migration, Toronto Metropolitan University. She leads a Social Science and Humanities Research Council funded project called, 'Beyond the Metropolis', which studies international migration to small and mid-sized cities in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It's so wonderful to have you both on the show today.

Aude Bernard

Hi, Maggie, thanks for having us.

Melissa Kelly

Thanks so much for the invitation. Great to be here.

Maggie Perzyna

So, just for a bit of context, today, we're talking about regional migration. What exactly does regional mean? Melissa, let's start with you.

Melissa Kelly

The term regionalization of migration in the context of countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, refers to policies and trends aimed at encouraging people to move to smaller cities, Rural areas or less populated regions. It often involves creating incentives or programs that direct migrants to move to smaller towns, rural areas or less populated regions, to balance population growth and economic development across the country.

Maggie Perzyna

So, Aude what prompted the focus on small and mid-sized cities, rather than large urban centers in your study?

Aude Bernard

Look in Australia, our settlement pattern, so, where the population leave is very similar to Canada, in the sense that we have a very large country, but a small population that's mainly located in capital cities, particularly in the particularly in the eastern seaboard. So, that's where most of the population lives, and that's where most migrants, when they arrive in Australia locate. Most of them, 80% locate in Melbourne and Sydney. There are two problems with this, and one of them is that, you know, it adds to the problems and challenges of housing supply and congestions. And at the same time, we know that regional like smaller towns, they sometimes face issues of de-population, or they find it difficult to attract skilled and unskilled migrants. So, the Australian government has been trying since the 1990s to attract migrants to these rural towns as to different visa programs. And so, what we wanted to do in that study is actually assess the effectiveness of these visas, not only in attracting but in retaining migrants in the longer term. So, it's really about, you know, policy assessment, evaluation what works and what doesn't, so that we can refine visa and visa policies to try to improve retention in the longer term.

Maggie Perzyna

Melissa, is it the same in Canada?

Melissa Kelly

Yeah, it's very similar since the 90s, so similar to the same timeline. In Australia, there's been a lot of interest on the part of policy makers in devising effective regionalization policies, and this, in turn, has created a lot of interest on the part of researchers in better understanding what factors could lead to successful regional settlement as well. Canada is a little bit different from Australia in that the provinces have even more control over devising immigration policies. We have the Provincial Nominee Program, for example, in Canada, which is highly developed, as well as a number of pilot programs such as the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot and the Atlantic Immigration Pilot, which has now been made permanent through a program. So, there's a lot of curiosity on the part of the government as to which of these programs is most effective, and why in terms of both attracting and retaining migrants to less urbanized areas. And as I said, research has also followed in suit to try to better understand these factors.

Maggie Perzyna

So Aude, what unique challenges do smaller cities face in attracting immigrants compared to large urban centers?

Aude Bernard

Look, that's a good question, and there are a number of factors that play a role in attracting and retaining. I think, a lot of migrants. There's this nice theory in migration research about networks and the fact that migrants often settle where there are established migrant communities, particularly people from their country or with their ethnic background. And so that's one of the reasons why migrants tend to locate in cities, they have established networks and pathways to get there. Cities also provide more services, perhaps better in some instances, educational and employment opportunities. So, all these factors explain why migrants tend to locate in cities rather than region. So, region is really about providing the services employment opportunities, but also kind of advertising themselves, and that's why government’s policies and visas are important helping regions doing this. I think something really important also to recognize is that, and Melissa touched on this, is that there are different visa programs to attract migrants to regions, and they do slightly different things. And so, the reason why people come and stay really depends on the visa you're on. So, for example, in Australia, we have these skilled visa programs. And what we mean by regional is very broad, is everything outside Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, so three larger capital cities, you have to reside in a regional area for two to four years. It was two years now I think it's four and then you can have permanent residency. So it's really a pathway to permanent residency for migrants, skilled migrants, who are already onshore in Australia. And that means that most of them will reside in regional areas only for a few years. Some stay, but most will leave. So the second type of visas is for humanitarian migrant and currently in Australia, and it's been in place since 2005, if you don't have any family connections, you are actually required to go in a regional center. And if you do, you actually provided more support in terms of housing and, you know, helping finding jobs. And then you have these temporary workers, whether they Working Holiday Makers that come here, they're in Australia temporarily, and if you go in regions that gives you access to a longer visa. And then you have these other visas specifically for agricultural workers, typically coming from the Pacific. And I'm saying this because what attracts migrants to regions, really, and the challenges these regions face would then handle on the visas people are on and for those who are staying long term, it's really finding suitable employment and housing opportunities for them and their family, where this is less important for migrants who come to regional areas on a temporary basis.

Maggie Perzyna

Melissa, based on your research, once they arrive, what helps newcomers stay and what pushes them to move on?

Melissa Kelly

Well, generally speaking, migrants will stay where they can meet their needs and aspirations, both in the immediate as well as the longer term. So, in the short term, this might mean being able to find a job, find affordable housing and get around easily within their community. They may also wish to have access to culturally appropriate food and religious services, and they may weigh their decisions to stay or move on based on their ability to meet these needs in the place of destination. In the longer term, it may mean realizing their career aspirations and cultivating a sense of belonging to the community. This means that a job may no longer be enough. They may want to see opportunities for career advancement if there are barriers to their career progression, or they don't see adequate opportunities, this might drive them to leave. They might also start to think about whether they have been able to build meaningful relationships with the people around them. Experiences of racism and discrimination, for example, can be something that pushes people away, or even just feelings of isolation and loneliness. It should be noted that we tend to focus just on the primary applicant, the person responsible for filing the immigration paper, so to speak. But actually, this person is often very concerned about the people that are with them, such as their spouse, their children, perhaps even their parents, if they would like their parents to join them once they're settled. So they may also question whether the place they're living in will meet the needs of all of their family members over the longer term.

Maggie Perzyna

I know you've done a lot of field work in cities in northern Ontario and Saskatchewan. Is there anything that's kind of stood out to you that demonstrates these choices that are made.

Melissa Kelly

I think one thing that really stood out for me in northern Ontario was the presence of a large and growing Indian diaspora, which is relatively new to the area. International students have been moving to Northern Ontario in large numbers, and the diasporic community there has really stepped up to support these students in terms of providing accommodation and meals on arrival, and because people feel that immediate sense of connection to a community, they're more inclined to stay and in turn, to give back to the community. So, I noticed a lot of international students were choosing to stay in the community and open businesses that catered to the Indian diaspora, such as restaurants and shops. Contribute to the development of religious organizations in the community, all of which encourage people to stay because they feel a stronger sense of belonging and attachment to the local area.

Maggie Perzyna

That's so interesting. Yeah, I remember when the government resettled a lot of the Syrian refugees, one of the really successful things was when they clustered larger groups and sort of we grew to that critical mass. Aude, based on your work, what's the biggest challenge that smaller cities face when it comes to integrating newcomers?

Aude Bernard

Look I think an interesting point is that Melissa and I, we research the same issues, but we take different approaches. So, Melissa takes more of a qualitative approach, which means that she can go in depth and talk to people, which is great. And I take a quantitative approach, which means that I work with very large data sets, so administrative data from the government, and I kind of, I cannot go in the same level of depth, but what I try to do get this population level insights. But listening to Melissa, the interesting bits is that there are some overlapping what we find, although we use different methods and study different contexts. So, for example, we also found that the secondary applicants and the family structure really matters. So, for example, in Australia, migrants who are older and who have children have a higher retention, because once they are committed to a place and the kids are at school, they're more likely to stay, whereas young adults who come to regions, young migrants, they don't have this type of commitment, so they can come and go. So, they have a lower retention. And you know, these co-ethnic communities also matter. We found that regional areas that have already a co-ethnic community have high retention. For example, in Australia we have a growing community of Filipinos in the Northern Territory in Darwin, which has very similar climatic conditions as the Philippines. And they have settled there and is growing a successful success story. We also had increasingly Indian migrants, who are now our first community, our first community in terms of arrival, in terms of numbers in Australia that are locating in regional areas in Tasmania, but also in remote part of the Northern Territory in Kathrine, which is really interesting. So, this really works. And I think the interesting takeaway message from me is that this community will grow over time, because once you manage to establish this co-ethnic community, more people will come and stay. So, it has a snowball effect. And something also that came in our study is and that links back to what Melissa was talking about, is employment opportunities. And we found that regions that have really good occupational diversity in terms of the jobs they offer, have a longer retention in the longer term. Something I think also that's important to remember and what we did in that study is that we also compared, you know, migrants to the Australian born population in terms of retention in regional areas. And actually, the factors are very similar. So, what we are saying is not specific to migrants. You know, they're facing exactly the same challenges in terms of staying in rural areas. So, policies that work for one group also work for the others, perhaps with the exception of humanitarian migrants that probably need much more support services on arrival.

Maggie Perzyna

Very interesting, Melissa, in terms of your research, we sort of talked about, what are the things that help newcomers stay? Are you finding the same kind of factors push them to move on?

Melissa Kelly

Well, I do think that the decision to be in a place doesn't happen at a single point in time. Migrants are constantly reassessing their options. And this is something that really needs to be taken into account, because I think a lot of policies assume that migrants will react in a certain way. For example, selection policies assume that if the right match is made between the opportunities in a place and the migrants looking for those opportunities, retention will be high, but people change over time. Their aspirations change, their expectations change. Migrants are just the same as the rest of us. As Aude was also saying, right? So, in a way, everyone is looking for similar things, which is opportunities to grow and develop their career, field a strong sense of belonging. So, I think migrants in the short term might be willing to just settle in a place to kind of get used to being in Canada or in Australia, but over time, they start to expect. More, and this is something that we have to take into account when we're devising regionalization policies.

Maggie Perzyna

So, you've had a chance to kind of look at the experiences and how they differ across Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Are there any observations that stand out?

Melissa Kelly

So, we've been in our beyond the metropolis project, making comparisons across eight different small and mid-sized cities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and I can say, from a geography perspective, there's definitely some differences. Particularly in the case of New Zealand, the cities that we tend to be looking at are much smaller than in the Australian and Canadian cases. So, obviously the definition of small and mid-sized city varies depending on the context, and definitely in New Zealand, when we're talking about small cities, we're talking about very small cities. Distance is also different. In New Zealand. It's a smaller country. Distances tend to be a lot less than in Australia and Canada, where you may have very, very large distances between cities. From a policy perspective, as I mentioned before, Canadian provinces have the most control over immigration, I would say, out of the three countries that we've been looking at. New Zealand in particular, is an outlier in that it has less region focused immigration policies, per se, their regionalization policies could be seen more as employer driven and integrated into more of a national framework, versus in Canada and to a lesser extent, Australia. Tthe regions themselves have more control. But honestly, like Aude said, I think the similarities outnumber the differences in so far as migrants are really finding themselves in smaller centers that have not typically received large numbers of migrants from places other than Europe, historically speaking.

Maggie Perzyna

So, what policies or programs seem to be working best in keeping migrants in smaller communities owed? Aude?

Aude Bernard

I think in Australia, there are a few interesting case studies looking at humanitarian migrants. As I said, the government is really trying to locate them on arrival in regional areas and programs that have located people from the same country tend to work. We have, for example, some members of the Burma community, Burmese community, that have been located jointly in New South Wales and Victoria, and that worked well. But also it's really about finding jobs, as Melissa said, and there are examples of region where, and you can be, you know, when I say Australia, you need to, if you don't have any family ties, you go to regional areas. But you also can be sponsored by community organizations or employers, and they have employers that has successfully employed large numbers of refugees in, for example, a factory or on a farm, and that has been successful, if there is a good match in terms of skills and occupation. I think that what you know the situation where it works is where you have employment opportunities, where you have a community that's willing and able as well. That means providing the right services. And you know, we have successful example in Australia of regions that had no humanitarian migrants or no non-European migrants. Coffs Harbour in New South Wales or Townsville in Australia that have been also, you know, supported by a local government that really want migrants to come, to support the economy and these tend to have been successful. I think the danger of regional kind of policies, they have the potential, if it doesn't work, to create a more transient population that just come and goes. I think it's so it's really important to have these types of policies in place to ensure that you have more permanent settlements in these more remote communities.

Maggie Perzyna

Melissa, same question for you, what policies or programs seem to be working best in keeping migrants in smaller communities in Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

Melissa Kelly

Well, interestingly, the Canadian government has been doing a lot of experimenting with different models in recent years, including those that really foreground the role of employers in selecting migrants and supporting them when they arrive, such as the Atlantic Immigration Program, or those alternatively, that foreground the role of communities in selecting and supporting migrants, such as the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot, I don't think there's necessarily a clear winner yet. We're still learning a lot in the Canadian context. So, I think Canada is a really. Interesting country to look at from that point of view. But I should also mention that, of course, it's not just about policies and programs. There's also a lot of other factors at play. Even just, you know, looking at the economy in different regions, things go through different cycles. So, it's not always clear what exactly is driving migrants to go where they go and to stay where they stay, whether it's, you know, the approach taken in the program, the supports people receive, or the opportunities they have, sometimes it's hard to distinguish between them. But definitely, I think Aude raised a lot of really important points. Migrants definitely need to feel supported wherever they go, and whether that's through, you know, a formal program, or through informal means, like I mentioned before, diasporic communities can play a big role in supporting new arrivals, but also community stakeholders do a lot of work to welcome migrants that might be considered outside the formal system of settling migrants. And this can make a huge difference. You know, there's some communities, for example, in Gray and Bruce counties in southern Ontario, stakeholders have really come together to welcome refugees, and it's been very, very successful, and now they're actually encouraging other communities to follow their model and to similarly come together to create a truly welcoming community.

Maggie Perzyna

Are there any surprising trends emerging from your research, something that maybe challenges conventional wisdom? Aude?

Aude Bernard

So, as I said, the retention of skilled migrants in particular, and when its a different arrival cohort, I think, from 2006 to 2019 and we followed them over many years, and we found that actually and Melissa kind of touched on this, that there are significant variation in retention levels depending on the arrival cohorts, perhaps linked to economic conditions. So, we found that for long term retention, regional retention was going down in Australia. We don't really know why, but it picked up again more recently. And so, as I said, you know, we're not really sure why, if it's economic circumstances or perhaps the composition of different arrival cohorts, but that really suggests that we need, it's really important to track different arrival cohorts and do longitudinal studies and have these temporal insights to understand in more detail what's going on. What also surprised us is that people who come on these regional visas, we tracked them for up to seven years, they don't have a higher retention that the Australian population. Some of them have, in fact, a lower retention despite the visa requiring them to stay in regions for up to four years. And so that's something we were not expecting. And that suggests that you know people who go voluntarily to regional areas are more likely to stay in the longer term. We also found that migrants, who had the experience of living in region, had a higher retention in the longer term. So, it's also taking all these different consideration to really boost retentions and better, perhaps understanding who goes on these visas and why, so that we can have a long term permanent population in this regional area.

Melissa Kelly

I don't know if it's necessarily a trend, but I would like to highlight that despite all of the negative discourse around the challenges of getting migrants to go to smaller communities, many migrants do want to settle in a smaller place, and they actually see it as an opportunity. You know, things like affordable housing, less traffic, access to be outdoors, a sense of safety, may all draw migrants to smaller centers and be factors that make them want to stay. However, sometimes they experience barriers to staying such as not being able to find affordable housing, or the fact that they don't have a driver's license and there's no public transportation available. So, I just, I think it's important to acknowledge that smaller centers aren't inherently less attractive. It's just that there are barriers that make it more difficult for some migrants to settle in these places.

Maggie Perzyna

So, if you could give one key piece of advice to policymakers or local leaders working on immigration strategies, what would it be? Aude?

Aude Bernard

Look when governments peak regions where they want to boost the number of migrants real regions, I think they need to really consider three dimensions, whether this region is ready, willing and able. So ready is having the right economic opportunities and employment for to support migrants. Willing, whether the community is actually willing to. Receive migrants, because that plays a really important role in people's experiences. And we found that migrants, particularly humanitarian migrants, in regional areas, are more likely to report instances of racism and discrimination. So, thinking about the community willingness, and finally, that the community is able, and that's having the means, and that includes, you know, providing the support services that are required for migrants on arrival and in the longer term.

Maggie Perzyna

Melissa, same question for you, one key piece of advice to policymakers or local leaders.

Melissa Kelly

I think what's really needed is the holistic long-term view, so not simply one that focuses on the selection of migrants to fill jobs in the here and now, but rather an approach that's driven not only by economic development, but with a view to social and cultural development as well. Of course, it's great if people have jobs on arrival, but long term, they'll be looking for other things too. They'll be looking for communities where they can feel safe walking around raise their children without worrying whether they're going to experience racism, and where they'll have things to do with their families on weekends. So really, a whole of community approach is what's needed, and this means migration policy cannot be separated from other policy domains such as urban planning, community development, even labour force development. We have to look at it very holistically.

Maggie Perzyna

Thanks to Aude Bernard and Melissa Kelly for joining me today and thank you for listening. This is a CERC Migration podcast produced in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe to Borders & Belonging on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on regional migration, please visit the show notes. Before we wrap up. Do you have an idea for an episode? Something we haven't covered yet but should. Season Four is all about your requests. DM us on LinkedIn or email bordersandbelonging@gmail.com. We'll feature the most compelling ideas in our next season. I'm Maggie Perzyna. Thanks for listening.

Season 3, Ep. 9: Beyond the Big City

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