Immigration and Integration in Canada in the Twenty-first Century, Edited by John Biles, Meyer Burstein and James Frideres, Kingston, Ont.: School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, 2008, 283 pp., ISBN 978-1-55339-216-3.

Immigrant integration should be treated cautiously. Research on the topic should be done with methodological rigour. Authors of this collective work, mainly from the public and academic sectors, are involved at different levels with the Metropolis Project, “an international network for comparative research and public policy development on migration, diversity, and immigrant integration in cities in Canada and around the world” (p. 176, n4). Published half way through its 5-year funding period, this book’s main intention is to propose a thorough evaluating program outlining the Canadian approach regarding immigrant integration, and to improve the way we “measure” this phenomenon. Reaching a high level of conceptualization, the book is designed to be useful to academics, but above all to policy makers. Would these officials ensure that from now on integration is considered as a matter not only of rights to be respected or services delivered, but also of responsibilities to be assumed by the persons living in a migration situation? This “two-way street” perspective, which nowadays taints Canadian immigration policy, is implicitly a recognition of the limits governments can impose on immigrant integration. Measuring integration comprehensively represents a major undertaking. In Part I, the concept of integration is scrutinized through four lenses. For each of these, contributors also give a relevant update of the research on the immigrant situation. Being the concern of the moment, economy opens this part. With all due caution, we learn that generally it takes more time for recent immigrants to reach Canadian-born standard of living, if compared with older cohorts of immigrants (p. 20, in chapter 1, written by Sweetman and Warman). Authors also assert that “there is no substantive evidence that immigration has negative net economic impact” on Canadian economy (p. 30). Still, indicators such as the number of immigrants who benefit from pre-arranged employment and other measures would help improve our overview of the complex economic situation of immigration. Talking about immigrants’ responsibilities regarding their own integration, authors analyze factors such as knowledge of one of Canada’s official languages and its economic benefits, especially for second-generation immigrants. The second lens through which Canadian immigration is analyzed is the political one. In chapter 2, Anderson and Black elaborate on a three-stage process that an immigrant could go through to be fully considered as integrated: 1) naturalization, 2) political participation (including voting and involvement in voluntary association), and 3) representation as office-holding. Reversely, contributors give a complete description of the requirements the host society has to fulfill in order to reach the closing stages of political integration. The next chapter tackles the complex subject of social integration. Its author, Frideres, who also acts as one of the book’s editors, explores every issue of the term, occasionally addressing other dimensions of integration, to attain a model made of three entities: 1) the host society (showing or not acceptance, institutionally and in its attitudes); 2) the immigrant (at both individual and community levels), and 3) social integration. This last entity shows up at three levels: i) the social one, addressing the immigrant’s institutional participation; ii) cultural, involving the internalization of values and norms, and iii) identity, the personal belonging to host society. Again, many indicators stem from this model. Part I’s last chapter deals with an interesting concept inspired by UNESCO’s work with indigenous people: cultural citizenship. After sorting out many definitions of this term and others connected to it (e.g. Bourdieu’s cultural capital, cultural participation, cultural sustainability, etc.), the authors, Stone et al., propose indicators surrounding cultural diversity (languages, cultural content in media and academic curricula, etc.), cultural participation (including donations, cultural consumption behaviours, participation in …