Quebec admitted precisely 52,808 new permanent residents to its territory last year, a sharp decline compared to the 68,722 people welcomed the previous year.
This gap represents 23% fewer immigrants between 2023 and 2022, and is explained by the catching up of the slow years of the pandemic. The year 2020 saw the entry flow shrink to 25,227 new arrivals. Aside from these anomalies, the number of admitted immigrants has remained relatively stable since the beginning of the 2010s: approximately 50,000 new permanent residents are admitted each year to Quebec.
This is what emerges from data published Thursday by the Institute of Statistics of Quebec on the occupation and vitality of territories.
Economic immigration
The category of “economic immigrants” remains the one that brings together the largest number of new Quebecers. These immigrants and their direct families represented 58% of people admitted in 2006, while in 2023, this category included 69% of people admitted.
Family reunification, a point of dispute between Quebec and Ottawa, concerned 10,292 immigrants last year, or nearly one new arrival in five.
France (13%) leads the country of origin of people immigrating to Quebec, ahead of Cameroon (12%) and China (11%). Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Haiti follow suit, each accounting for between 4% and 5% of arrivals.
The retention rate of immigrants has been decreasing slightly over the years. The proportion of people admitted to Quebec over the course of a decade and still present “in January of the second year following the end of this decade”, according to the phrasing of the ISQ, fell from 76% to 73% between 2012 and 2022.
Temporary immigration
This decrease also hides a strong increase. Because for some 52,000 permanent residents, Quebec welcomed 174,200 new non-permanent residents last year, an absolute record. This form of immigration mainly concerns temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum seekers.
The sustained growth of this category of migrants brings the total number of non-permanent residents present in Quebec to more than 560,000 at the start of 2024.
All in all, immigration has pushed Quebec’s population up by 2.5% in 2023. This increase made it possible to cross the symbolic threshold of 9 million Quebecers last January.
This report is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.