Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) recently announced that it would receive $98.6 million in immigrant-related research funding from the federal government over seven years.
TMU President Mohamed Lachemi said, “Our university, together with our partner universities, is confident that this research will yield new and beneficial results. New knowledge and discoveries about immigrants will soon be reflected in government policy, helping both immigrants and Canada in the future.”
Located at 350 Victoria St. in downtown Toronto, the school, formerly known as Ryerson University, will work with Concordia University in Montreal, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver for the next seven years to help immigrants to Canada in the mid-21st century.
This is the first project in Canada to study immigrants systematically, over a long period of time, and extensively.
In the meantime, Canada has accepted immigrants with a risk management policy based on common sense without any academic or systematic research on immigration. 200 research groups from 4 universities and 100 scholars participate in this research, and 1,500 assistants are employed.
The person who will lead the mammoth-class research is TMU’s director of science, Anna Trianedaepiridow.
Research goals are compressed into four areas. Issues of immigrants enjoying health and well-being, their employment and skill acquisition, housing and residential environment, citizenship acquisition and social participation.
A study like this was desperately needed as Canada relies heavily on immigrants in a situation where the labour force continues to be in short supply worldwide and labour shortages in many fields continue.
Canada admitted 437,000 new immigrants last year, as well as 1.2 million temporary workers and international students.