• Reading age: 16

The allure of Atlantic Canada has been widely publicized to assorted, targeted groups alongside colourful pictures of stunning seascapes. Communities in Atlantic Canada have promoted the region’s purportedly high quality of life, contrasting it with the challenges of “big city” life. In the pitch to newcomers, healthy and safe communities and a lower cost of living, including lower housing prices, are featured in the hope that these considerations will entice immigrants to move to, and make new homes in the region. But for immigrants especially, how much of this is rhetoric, and how much of this is reality? Is Atlantic Canada truly welcoming, and what really makes it a home away from home for newcomers in the region? 

The chapters in this volume underscore that a welcoming environment consists not simply of ordinary people’s reception of, and encounters with, newcomers and immigrants in everyday life. Beyond this human “warmth of the welcome” in official literature and by the general public, there are also several institutional and structural layers that constitute and frame such a welcoming environment: favourable political economic conditions; receptive community relations including inter-ethnic group relations; the existence of local, national and transnational family networks; and the presence of policies and practices that not only concern immigration, settlement and integration, but also around such issues as adequate, accessible, affordable housing or childcare. These layers of welcome for immigrants and newcomers ultimately lead and correspond to the dimensions of a broadly defined notion of encompassing the intertwined and interrelated economic, social, political and emotional dimensions and processes of citizenship.

EVANGELIA TASTSOGLOU, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, at Saint Mary’s University. She has published widely in the areas of gender and international migration; immigrant and minority women and citizenship, Canadian immigration, settlement and integration with a feminist and intersectional perspective; diasporas and diasporic identities.

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Alexandra Dobrowolsky holds the rank of Professor of Political Science.  She completed her PhD at Carleton University in 1996, and then a Postdoctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University in 1997. She worked as an Assistant Professor in Political Science at York University from 1997-2000. She joined the Saint Mary's University Political Science Department in 2000. Her research, writing and teaching deal with the theories and practices of representation, mobilization, citizenship, and democratic governance. Her most recent work explores changing citizenship regimes in relation to social policy, as well as to security and immigration in Canada and Britain.

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BARBARA COTTRELL has conducted numerous research projects including Violence in Immigrant Families and is the author of When Teens Abuse Their Parents (2004). Barbara is Past President of the NS Chapter of the Canadian Evaluation Society and a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – NS.

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