A “stopover place” at best? Recent trends in immigration attraction and retention on Prince Edward Island

Abstract

The four Atlantic provinces of Canada share major and abiding concerns with their (still low overall) immigrant retention rates, and their provincial governments in particular are likely to be well disposed to consider what mechanisms they may effectively deploy in order to improve these. Yet, as the data presented in this paper suggests, Prince Edward Island is behaving mainly as a temporary, transit station where immigrants deposit some of their funds before they proceed with their plans to settle more permanently elsewhere in the country; indeed, some PNP beneficiaries head straight to settle somewhere else circumventing PEI altogether. This chapter, based also on material from a larger study (Baldacchino et al. 2009), explores and fleshes out these issues by focusing mainly on the opinions and experiences of a sample of twenty-four Korean immigrant respondents. Their views question the double assumption that immigrants have a desire to settle on PEI, and that the local host communities also desire or have as much interest in supporting such settlement.