Keywords

1 Immigration Policy and Less-Favoured Regions and Cities

Immigration drives economic growth and prosperity in receiving countries (OECD, 2022). But immigration also tends to contribute to spatial inequality within states as immigrants gravitate to highly urbanised regions and larger cities with stronger economies (Heider et al., 2020). There is a growing interest in countries like Canada and the United States in spreading the benefits of immigration to ‘less favoured regions and cities’ – places which are ‘excluded from the global circuits of capital, information and knowledge’ (Martin et al., 2022, p. 14). These places may face a myriad of demographic and economic challenges associated with aging or shrinking populations, slow growth, and economic decline (Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2012; Lichter & Johnson, 2020; Hartt, 2021). How can immigration to such places be encouraged and with what opportunities and challenges?

This chapter uses the cases of Atlantic Canada and the US Rust Belt (Fig. 6.1) to examine how different approaches to immigration impact the ability of less-favoured regions and cities to recruit newcomers. I use the term settlement to describe the immediate needs of newcomers and integration to the process through which immigrants come to participate without barriers in the social, economic, cultural, and political life of the communities in which they settle (Kaushik & Drolet, 2018). Welcoming refers to a community’s degree of receptivity towards immigrants. Welcoming initiatives, then, promote ‘warmer receptivity’ and encourage integration (see McDaniel et al., 2019, p. 1142).

Fig. 6.1
The areas of the Rustbelt and Atlantic Canada are shaded on a map.

Map of Atlantic Canada and the U.S. Rust Belt

Full size image

The Rust Belt refers to the former manufacturing heartland of the US, encompassing Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and most of New York. It includes cities built on metals in southwest Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio as well as cities built on the automotive industry in southeast Michigan, northwest Ohio, and eastern Indiana. Atlantic Canada comprises Canada’s four easternmost provinces: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. This region includes cities originally built on fishing, mining, forestry, and offshore oil, as well as shipbuilding. Both Atlantic Canada and the Rust Belt once served as major gateways for immigrants to their respective countries. But having experienced long-standing economic crises, their cities now generally have smaller foreign-born shares (Brodie, 1997; Neumann, 2016; Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021). Both can both be understood as ‘aspiring gateways’ in that they ‘proactively aspire to become welcoming, new destinations’ for immigrants by adopting initiatives to attract and retain newcomers (Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021). Local actors increasingly promote welcoming as a population growth and economic diversification strategy. Yet, they do so with very different policy tools at their disposal.

Canada has a ‘merit-based’ immigration system where immigrants are selected primarily on their economic potential through a points-based federal skilled worker programme, alongside employer-driven programmes (Chand & Tung, 2019). Canada has also devolved some immigration powers to its provinces and territories, allowing them to select immigrants based on regional labour market needs (Paquet & Xhardez, 2020). These Provincial and Territorial Nominee Programs (PNPs) disperse immigration to less-favoured regions like Atlantic Canada and cities like Halifax, St. John’s, and Fredericton, where the population is aging at a faster rate than the rest of Canada, have difficulty recruiting and keeping immigrants, and have long faced challenges of youth out-migration and economic disadvantage vis-à-vis central and western Canada (Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, 2021). One of Canada’s employer-driven immigration programmes – the Atlantic Immigration Program – also encourages immigration to the Atlantic provinces (IRCC, 2020). Alongside these explicitly place-based immigration programmes, immigrant integration is also supported across the country from the ‘top down’ through federally-funded settlement, multiculturalism, and citizenship programs (Griffith, 2017).

In contrast, in the US, family reunification remains the foundation of the immigration system (Gubernskaya & Dreby, 2017). Skilled immigration streams are smaller and employer-driven: skilled workers must be sponsored in the H-1B ‘specialty occupation’ visa lottery by an employer, who may later also sponsor their application for permanent residency (Chand & Tung, 2019). Unlike Canada, the US has no national immigrant integration programme; states have no direct control over immigrant selection although some have introduced inclusionary and exclusionary legislation vis-à-vis immigrant welcoming and access to services (Filindra & Manatschal, 2020). Efforts to use immigration to address spatial inequality are happening outside of formal policy channels from the ‘bottom up,’ driven by networks of local business associations and non-profit organisations that increasingly promote immigration as a tool of economic revitalisation in the Rust Belt and as a solution to specific problems such as urban vacancy, population decline, and economic stagnation (Rodriguez et al., 2018; Welcoming Economies Global Network, 2021). What do these differences mean for how these locations engage with immigration? What are the commonalities and divergences in Atlantic Canada’s and the Rust Belt’s approaches to and framings of international migration?

My findings are based on several years of fieldwork in both regions, involving participant observation at immigration summits and conventions, stakeholder interviews, and media and document analysis. In the Rust Belt, I undertook participant observation at two Welcoming Economies Global Network Conventions in Dayton (2015) and Philadelphia (2016) and conducted 16 interviews with welcoming initiative leaders in ten Rust Belt cities (Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo, St. Louis, Detroit, and Buffalo) as well as targeted interviews with newcomers in Cleveland, Ohio, from 2015 to 2017. The Atlantic Canadian findings are drawn from participant observation at a series of immigration consultations and meetings held in the region from 2015 to 2019, including the Atlantic Immigration Summit, Metropolis Conference on Immigration, Pathways to Prosperity Conference, and the NL Provincial Immigration Consultations. I also draw on interviews with 14 community leaders, government representatives, the private sector, and non-governmental organisations in Atlantic Canadian cities (Charlottetown, Fredericton, Moncton, Halifax, Sydney, Saint John, and St. John’s).

This chapter examines the dynamic geographies of immigration policy, illustrating how the challenges, opportunities, and meta-narratives of migration and economic productivity play out across these different socio-political systems. Ultimately, dynamic regions need dynamic solutions and cities in these regions provide a roadmap for understanding the role of immigration in addressing uneven development.

2 Immigrant and Refugee-Led Revitalisation in the Rust Belt’s Aspiring Gateways

Although Rust Belt cities welcomed large numbers of European immigrants in their industrial heyday, today they generally have smaller foreign-born shares than the US average (Pottie-Sherman, 2020). As many core metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt experienced population decline associated with deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, and the racial stigmatisation of African American-majority neighbourhoods, the migration flows that reshaped Sun Belt cities like Atlanta, Houston, or Phoenix in the second half of the twentieth century largely bypassed them (Singer, 2015; Hackworth, 2016). Over the last four decades, ‘former immigrant gateways’ like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh saw only small increases in their immigrant populations while also experiencing substantial population losses (Singer, 2015; Table 6.1).

Table 6.1 Immigrant percent and total population estimate, selected Rust Belt cities, 2016–2020
Full size table

Because of these patterns, a new pro-immigration movement has emerged in this region. Many organisations and policy actors have rallied around the notion that immigrants and refugees will ‘save the Rust Belt’ by injecting population, reinvigorating declining neighbourhoods, and stimulating the economy (Shrider, 2017).

These narratives materialised in the wake of the 2007–2008 financial crisis with the 2010 launch of Global Detroit, a non-profit organisation whose goal is to attract and retain immigrants (Pottie-Sherman, 2018a). A related movement – the Welcoming Economies Global Network (WE Global) – encourages Rust Belt cities to support immigrants as an economic development strategy (WE Global Network 2021). WE Global emphasises the economic contributions of immigrants and refugees as entrepreneurs, as workers in sectors experiencing labour shortage, and more generally as homeowners and taxpayers. As one NGO-leader within this network acknowledged,

people in power are very interested in taking the natural phenomenon like immigration and promoting it and accelerating it for purposes of an economic plan to revitalise. I see that as a very strategic, a very intentional approach of Rust Belt cities to say that we need more taxes, population, and we can’t drive the birth rate up, and we cannot attract people from other parts of the country so let’s get people from the rest of the world. (Interview, 2015)

Such projects view immigration as a solution to systemic issues facing Rust Belt cities, including the fiscal squeeze resulting from the hollowing out of their core areas.

But the string of new local initiatives that surrounds this movement is not exclusively focused on newcomers’ economic contributions. For example, the Welcome Dayton process centred on the ‘intentional recognition’ of immigrants – a practice of community engagement emphasising the autonomy of community members, ‘shared humanity’, and the ‘latent possibility’ of the community (Housel et al., 2018, p. 393). The WE Global Network and many other initiatives are now also part of Welcoming America, a national non-profit organisation with many affiliates in the Rust Belt (Welcoming America, 2021). To become ‘Certified Welcoming’, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Dayton, Toledo, and Erie had to complete WA’s six-step process and requirements across seven frameworks ranging from government leadership to equitable access (Welcoming America, 2017). One of these requirements is that the jurisdiction have a policy ‘that designates a unit focused on immigrant inclusion work’, and this unit must be ‘formalised, active, and [with] dedicated staff’ (Welcoming America, 2017, p. 11). These requirements aim to ensure that welcoming projects are about more than place promotion. Recent research by Huang (2021) finds a correlation between Detroit’s pro-immigration welcoming policy and the city’s foreign-born population, indicating that welcoming policies can have real population impacts.

2.1 Red States and Blue Cities: Immigration and Scalar Tensions

This instrumentalisation of migration in the Rust Belt is significant given that family reunification remains the foundation of US immigration policy and much subnational immigration activism in the US has focused on undocumented immigrants’ access to the labour market, housing, or other services (Paquet, 2020). Republican-led state legislatures in the Rust Belt have indeed passed restrictive legislation towards the undocumented and so-called red state-blue city clashes on immigration are common between Republican-dominated legislatures and cities with Democrat-affiliated mayors – red and blue symbolising areas where Republican and Democrat voters form the majority, respectively (Interview, 2015). These conflicts are especially salient in the Rust Belt where ‘blue’ cities like Cleveland and Erie are surrounded by ‘red’ suburban and rural counties where Trump’s anti-immigration messaging appeals (Pottie-Sherman, 2020). But in the Rust Belt, there is also a notable competing regime at the state level which has set its sights on skilled immigrant workers (Pottie-Sherman, 2018b). This regime includes legislation surrounding the attraction and retention of skilled migrants such as Ohio’s Global Reach to Engage Academic Talent and Michigan’s Global Talent Retention initiatives (ibid.). Like in other jurisdictions, exclusionary policies at higher levels – including attempts by states such as in Ohio to require cities and school districts to enforce immigration laws – have motivated Rust Belt actors to pursue welcoming campaigns (Pottie-Sherman, 2018a, 2020). One leader of a local inclusionary initiative explained this as a desire to be ‘on the right side of history’ given the clash between these immigration agendas.

Urban actors in the Rust Belt also attempt to recruit skilled workers by exploring pathways in the US immigration system. For example, Global Cleveland, a non-profit organisation, has promoted a stepping stone strategy for international students in Ohio that encourages them to work temporarily after graduation through the ‘Optional Practical Training’ period. Global Cleveland also encourages employers to sponsor international students in the H-1B lottery, which in theory, provides a pathway to a green card and their long-term retention in Ohio’s labour market. In practice, however, students who want to remain in the US face numerous challenges, including sudden visa restrictions, the requirement to find a company willing and able to sponsor them, and the odds of being randomly selected for a highly competitive H-1B visa (Pottie-Sherman, 2018b).

Such tenuous pathways reflect the failure of immigration reformers to introduce so-called Heartland Visas at the federal level that would help disadvantaged communities recruit skilled immigrants (US Conference of Mayors, 2019). The Heartland Visa proposal, however, has gained traction in recent years; in 2020 it was endorsed by the Great Lakes Metro Chambers Coalition (an association of business networks across the Great Lakes region) and by Pete Buttigieg (former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and current US Secretary of Transportation) in his presidential campaign, among other actors (see Great Lakes Metro Chambers Coalition, 2020).

3 Refugee Resettlement and Neighbourhood Revitalisation

Many pro-immigration projects in the Rust Belt also aim to direct refugees to particular neighbourhoods in the hopes of addressing core metro area population loss and property abandonment (Pottie-Sherman, 2018a). These projects attempt to harness what Hyndman (2022) describes as the ‘geoscripts’ of refugee resettlement, a term referring to the spatial distribution of service providers and the trajectories of migration (including secondary migration) they engender. Despite their low immigration levels, some Rust Belt places have among the largest per capita shares of refugees in the US, owing to the longstanding role of voluntary organisations serving refugees (VolAgs) in the Great Lakes region. Some cities like St. Louis, Columbus, and Dayton have also attracted considerable flows of secondary refugee migration. In the absence of large-scale immigration in these cities, refugee communities have a considerable economic and social presence. In the words of one Ohio-based service provider, refugees

are playing a huge role in cities like ours…moving in 700 refugees a year helps that population decline. It helps diversify our city. Those refugees are the hardest working people you’ll ever meet…They are contributing to the revitalization of this city (Interview, 2015).

This statement illustrates the complexities (and strange bedfellows) at the core of diversity politics in less favoured regions. VolAgs are tasked with securing safe and affordable housing for refugees and have found allies in growth coalitions that seek to stimulate Rust Belt housing markets and see refugees as a ‘vacant property solution.’ For example, Dayton’s ‘Green and Gold’ investment strategy explicitly supported the revitalisation of the city’s North Side neighbourhood by former refugees (Pottie-Sherman, 2018a). In Cleveland, through the Discovering Home programme, VolAgs have partnered with land banks, real estate agents, and contractors to share the costs of renovating property with the ultimate goal of renting it to refugees (ibid.).

Declines in US refugee admissions have been disastrous for cities like Erie where refugees play a substantial role in the local economy. Squeezed between a supportive local government and Trump-era dismantling of the US refugee resettlement system, VolAgs serving refugees in Erie (and elsewhere) were forced to terminate projects, lay off staff, and close local offices (Ryssdal & Palacios, 2020). This destruction of local resettlement infrastructure has also disrupted efforts to rebuild the US Refugee Admissions Programme under the Biden administration (Zak, 2021).

In the absence of state-sponsored refugee flows, some Rust Belt cities like Cincinnati and Buffalo have attempted to recruit new populations by rebranding themselves as climate havens, citing their relative protection from natural disasters (City of Cincinnati, 2018). Declaring Buffalo a ‘Climate Refuge City’ in 2019, its mayor described the city’s redundant industrial infrastructure as an ‘asset’ for welcoming people escaping environmental hazards (City of Buffalo, 2020). Such efforts can be understood as being part of a ‘new climate urbanism’ as they reflect the competitive imperative for cities to chase new rounds of speculative investment and are likely to reproduce familiar patterns of neoliberal inequality (Shi, 2020).

3.1 Racial Equity and the Local Governance of Immigration

Immigrant attraction projects in the Rust Belt must grapple with deeply entrenched racial divides and the relationships between processes like land abandonment and structural racism (Interview, 2015). As the Welcome Dayton (2014, p. 5) strategy notes, immigrant-friendly initiatives must also address the ‘unfulfilled integration’ of long-term African American residents of Rust Belt cities so that projects to welcome newcomers are not seen as encroachments on ‘scarce resources’ (see Mallach & Tobocman, 2021). One key informant in Pittsburgh explained this tension as follows:

we need to keep the community who’s here now, which is our Black American community and then our small but growing immigrant community in mind and try to build that unity so that there’s not this divide and conquer or competition pitting one group against the other. (Interview, 2015)

This tension is also recognised by initiatives such as Global Detroit, and there are efforts in some Rust Belt cities to involve African American communities in the local governance of immigration (Interview, 2015). Some of these initiatives, for example, involve community policing partnerships, given the shared fear and distrust that racialised people have towards law enforcement (City of Pittsburgh, 2015).

4 Demographic Demands and the Aspiring Immigration Gateways of Atlantic Canada

Urban actors in the Rust Belt increasingly view immigrant welcoming as a strategy for reasserting their cities within the urban hierarchy and reversing trends of property abandonment and population decline (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2021). These strategies have become increasingly formalised and concerned with substantive issues such as racial equity through WE Global and Welcoming America. In this section, I consider the dynamic geographies of immigration shaping Atlantic Canada, another region where narratives of immigration and population growth and economic productivity are prevalent.

Like the Rust Belt, parts of the Atlantic region, notably Halifax, were central gateways for European immigration to Canada until the 1970s (Schwinghamer & Raska, 2020). But deindustrialisation in the early twentieth century, followed by crises in natural resources, solidified the peripheral position of the Atlantic provinces vis-a-vis central Canada (Brodie, 1997). Today, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador all face youth out-migration and demographic aging to varying degrees (Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, 2021). When it comes to immigration, the Atlantic region continues to have the lowest immigrant proportions compared to other Canadian provinces, ranging from 2.8% in Newfoundland and Labrador to 7.8% in Prince Edward Island (for reference, according to Statistics Canada (2021), immigrants make up 30% and 29% of the populations of Ontario and British Columbia and 23% of Canada’s total population). Thirteen of Atlantic Canada’s 18 cities have immigrant proportions below 5% of their total populations, mirroring many Rust Belt cities (see Table 6.2).

Table 6.2 Immigrant percent and total population estimate, Atlantic Canadian cities, 2016
Full size table

The Atlantic provinces also have the lowest retention rates in Canada. Less than half of the immigrants who settled in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island in 2014 were still in those provinces in 2021 (Statistics Canada, 2022). Nova Scotia ‘s retention rate is higher at 63% but still much lower than Ontario, which retained 94% of its immigrants during the same period (ibid.). There are numerous reasons for these low retention rates. Immigrants in Atlantic Canada – particularly educated professionals – often leave the region in search of higher wages or to join family elsewhere in Canada (Ramos & Yoshida, 2011). There are also many spatial and social challenges at play including the climate, geographic isolation, tight-knit host communities, and the relative lack of co-ethnic resources compared to larger Canadian cities (Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021). The Atlantic provinces also function as ‘transit’ spaces for immigrants’ secondary migration to other parts of Canada (Baldacchino, 2015).

Immigration in Atlantic Canada is thus framed as a tool to address ‘economic decline, labour force shortages, and ‘looming demographic imperatives” (Lewis, 2010, p. 244). Local projects across Atlantic Canada recruit newcomers to fill jobs in healthcare, trades, farming, and seafood processing (Government of Nova Scotia, 2021) or, in the case of some Francophone cities in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, to preserve the linguistic balance between French and English (City of Dieppe, 2020).

Despite some parallel rationales for promoting immigration in the two regions, there are major differences. For one, the spatial context of population decline differs in Atlantic Canada as it impacts primarily rural areas and smaller urban communities. While some smaller cities like the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (in Nova Scotia) and Corner Brook (in Newfoundland and Labrador) shrank during the last census period, growth in Halifax and Charlottetown during the same period approached 10% (Statistics Canada, 2021). Rather than experiencing land abandonment, Halifax, Charlottetown, and St. John’s face housing affordability crises, exacerbated by the pandemic’s counter-urbanisation trend (Woodbury, 2021). Immigration trends have also shifted in recent years, with immigration accounting for 64% of Halifax’s population growth between 2019 and 2020 as the city gained nearly 6000 new immigrants, accompanied by a boost in interprovincial migration (Halifax Partnership, 2021). While some places like Charlottetown have seen substantial growth in their immigrant populations over the last decade, others like St. John’s have seen very slow growth, reflecting the difficulties of attracting and retaining newcomers to the spatially isolated capital of Newfoundland and Labrador (Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021).

Spatial patterns of urban change are also generally more varied in Atlantic Canada compared to the Rust Belt. Atlantic Canadian cities generally do not exhibit the same racial segregation, land abandonment, or declining urban infrastructureFootnote 1 (Kaida et al., 2020). At the same time, however, Atlantic cities also do not exhibit the same intense patterns of gentrification and investment that have transformed the cores of Canada’s major cities (ibid.). For immigration, these patterns mean that the labour and housing markets of mid-sized cities in Atlantic Canada can be more open to newcomers than traditional destinations like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal (Sano et al., 2017).

The PNPs have had a significant impact on immigration to Atlantic Canada, particularly in cities. Since their implementation, they are now the primaryFootnote 2 attraction mechanism for economic immigrants to the Atlantic region, by 2015 representing from 59% to 96% of economic immigration to these provinces (IRCC, 2015). With the introduction of the PNP, Charlottetown, for example, saw its immigrant population grow by 148% between 2006 and 2016 (Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021). With international student permanent residency streams, PNPs have made higher education institutions – mostly based in urban areas – into central gateways for immigrants to the region. Internationalisation efforts at Newfoundland and Labrador’s only university – located in St. John’s – have driven that city’s diversification (Graham & Pottie-Sherman, 2022).

There are even PNP streams for international students who wish to start businesses after graduation, such as Newfoundland and Labrador’s International Graduate Entrepreneur category introduced in 2018 (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2019). With immigration and education programmes that support and retain international graduate entrepreneurs, there is a clear relationship between immigration, higher education, and an emerging technology start-up ecosystem in St. John’s that is fuelled by international students (Graham & Pottie-Sherman, 2022). The ability to link immigration to the triple helix of innovation – involving higher education, industry, and government – would be the envy of many US immigration reformers in the Rust Belt who also frame international students as potential innovators.

4.1 Local Immigration Partnerships: Formalised Intergovernmental Collaboration on Immigration

In urban Atlantic Canada, unlike the Rust Belt, there is a high level of intergovernmental collaboration on immigration. Whereas the US is characterised by intense scalar conflict on immigration, in Canada immigration and settlement are increasingly managed at the local level through federally-funded multi-sectoral networks known as Local Immigration Partnerships (LIPs). LIPs originated in Ontario in the mid-2000s to foster welcoming communities across Canada (Burr, 2011). Since 2013, nine LIPs have formed in Atlantic Canada.Footnote 3 With their introduction, the larger cities across Atlantic Canada have become more active in immigration. For example, Moncton launched its first formal immigration strategy in 2014, followed by Fredericton and Dieppe in 2019. And Halifax’s LIP supports the city’s 2013 Welcoming Newcomers Action Plan (City of Halifax, 2022). Like the welcoming movement in the Rust Belt, LIPs frame newcomer attraction and retention as an economic development imperative.

LIPs also share some commonalities with US ‘Certified Welcoming’ cities: they both develop through a series of prescribed stages, require horizontal partnerships, establish a strategy, and require progress monitoring (Welcoming America, 2017). LIPs, however, are formal federal-local agreements formed in a context where immigration governance is primarily about reaping the economic benefits of immigration (in contrast to the US where issues of immigration control have dominated immigration debates and family reunification remains the organizing principle of immigrant selection). Canada lacks a large undocumented immigrant population and is geographically isolated from spontaneous immigration. As a result, debates about immigration in Atlantic Canada, when they occur, tend to focus on whether the party in power is doing enough to attract and retain newcomers. In contrast, Welcoming America is a non-profit organisation operating without a national immigrant integration strategy and where access-oriented debates about undocumented immigrants dominate.

4.2 Refugee Resettlement and Entrepreneurial Refugee Sponsorship

Like the Rust Belt, ‘geoscripts’ of refugee resettlement shape urban Atlantic Canada (Hyndman, 2022). Government-sponsored refugees in Canada do not choose where they settle initially. The responsibility for resettling government-assisted refugees is dispersed across 11 sponsoring institutions in Atlantic Canada. Recent refugee arrivals have had significant impacts on the population shifts of some Atlantic cities. For example, Nova Scotia's intake in 2017 of 1475 Syrian refugees – who resettled predominantly in the Halifax metro area – shifted the direction of provincial population change (Luck, 2017).

Parallel to the Rust Belt, there is an entrepreneurial element to refugee sponsorship in Atlantic Canada, where refugees are seen as important agents of population and economic revitalisation. This element is apparent in recent responses to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. In March of 2022, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador was the first province to send staff members to Poland to establish a Ukrainian Family Support Desk (CBC, 2022). While this has been framed as a humanitarian effort, it is notable that the earliest such effort was led by the only shrinking province in Canada.

5 Concluding Remarks: Common Threads and Diverging Spatial Contexts in Atlantic Canada and the Rust Belt

There are common threads between the Rust Belt and Atlantic Canada: both are experimental spaces within narratives of migration as a solution to population loss and economic stagnation and also reflect the embrace of proactive, forward-looking initiatives. These commonalities led me to frame these places as aspiring gateways (Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021).

At the same time, as this chapter illustrates, these two regions represent different spatial contexts of demographic aging and shrinking with implications for local migration governance and activism. In the Rust Belt, pro-immigration projects specifically target core neighbourhoods. Framings of migration in Atlantic Canada have been far less spatially targeted, despite a generalised interest in spreading the ‘benefits’ of migration to smaller communities and rural areas. Divergences in immigration federalism shape how these two regions portray immigration and their capacity to attract and retain immigrants. Some US immigration reformers applaud the policy tools at the disposal of provincial officials in Atlantic Canada, proposing a Heartland Visa to drive immigration up in the American Midwest (Ozimek, 2019). The question remaining concerns whether these reformers should be looking to Atlantic Canada (or vice versa)?

One assumption of the US Heartland Visa movement is that place-based immigration pathways will make it easier for regions like the Rust Belt to attract and retain immigrants. But as the case of Atlantic Canada shows, attraction and retention is far more complicated. Retention continues to be a challenge, even after years of provincial involvement in immigration policy through the PNPs and intergovernmental collaboration on integration through arrangements such as the LIPs.

In addition, developments in Atlantic Canada such as the PNPs are part of the broader neoliberalisation of Canadian immigration policy giving the private sector greater control. It is important to ask whether this is a positive step in the governance of immigration. Entrepreneurial immigration programmes in Canada have a chequered past, especially in Atlantic Canada where they have enabled immigration fraud or simply not resulted in business success. While preliminary evidence suggests that new programmes to put universities at the centre of immigrant entrepreneurship policy is positive, the success of such arrangements hinges on the alignment of all levels of government – an alignment sorely lacking in the Rust Belt.

Higher education in Atlantic Canada has clearly been a driver of immigration, but the pandemic has also exposed how precarious this channel is, including at Canadian public universities which have increasingly relied on international student tuition dollars to offset reductions in government spending. Cape Breton University, in Nova Scotia, reflects an extreme case of this trend. The university was under threat due to declining domestic enrolments but reversed its fortunes by recruiting large numbers of international student enrolment in just a few years. Then, when Covid-19 halted international education, CBU was forced to lay off employees and cut wages (Martin, 2020).

Reflecting its rise in the Canadian urban hierarchy, Halifax, at the urban scale, has been the most proactive in terms of pro-immigration policies. While Halifax and Charlottetown have had the most success in increasing immigration numbers, both cities are now facing major housing crises. Immigrants in Canada have traditionally been both major drivers of urban housing markets and among the most precariously housed. These trends have been particularly pronounced in Canada’s major cities, but we are increasingly seeing them in Atlantic Canada. As the pandemic recedes and immigration levels stabilise, the financialisation of housing and the decoupling of housing and labour markets is making immigrants in Atlantic Canada more vulnerable to housing stress. St. John’s, for example, has recently welcomed hundreds of Ukrainian refugees, but 100 families are still living in a hotel because there are simply not enough rental units available in the city (Bulman, 2022).

Clearly, then, there are some lessons for the Rust Belt from the Atlantic Canadian experience. Conversely, from an Atlantic Canadian point of view, what lessons might be learned from the Rust Belt? The Rust Belt experience also shows that even if immigration has not reversed population decline, it still has a significant impact through the offsetting of population loss and changes to the composition of the population. Atlantic Canadian cities with very small immigrant populations might take notes from the ‘intentional recognition’ goals of the Welcome Dayton strategy, or from Global Detroit’s emphasis on racial equity (Housel et al., 2018; Mallach & Tobocman, 2021). For example, in recent years, welcoming and population growth coalitions in Atlantic Canada have begun to grapple with how best to engage Indigenous communities in these efforts (Montiel, 2019).

A central tension emerging from this comparison is around aspiring gateways as potential sources of inspiration versus the risks involved with an instrumentalised welcoming, where the warmth of welcome hinges on the ability of newcomers to reverse structural problems. The preoccupation with restoring population and economic growth may also lead places to ignore the integration needs of longstanding communities (Mallach & Tobocman, 2021). The more important takeaway from both contexts is that immigration is not a panacea for population decline, and it cannot be pursued as a solution without also doing things that make a location a better place to live in.