Creating a welcoming and supportive environment helps immigrants better integrate

• This year, the federal government has set a target of welcoming 485,000 new permanent residents.
• While many of those people come to Canada with hopes of establishing new and better lives, integrating and finding one’s way around a new country can often be challenging.
• A core idea in cross-cultural psychology is that immigrants who integrate more successfully in their new society end up with better mental well-being.

What comes first?

Since the 1970s, cross-cultural psychology research has tried to understand which migrants do well, which ones struggle and why? The answer to these questions is crucial. Poor psychological health can be devastating for people, but it is also extremely costly for societies — an estimated 2.5 trillion dollars cost to the world economy per year.

• Many studies have shown that participants who score high on biculturalism questionnaires also score high on emotional well-being questionnaires.
• What comes first, integration or emotional well-being?
• The answer even has political relevance as immigration and integration are polarizing topics and increasingly central to election platforms.
• In short, an alternative “mental resources hypothesis,” where greater emotional well-being is a resource leading to integration, is as plausible as the widely touted integration hypothesis.

Our study

• To properly shed light on the issue, we need longitudinal studies, where we ask integration and well-being questions repeatedly over time.
• We recruited international students who had just arrived in Montréal and followed them during their first year in the country.
• Because their arrival is synchronized with the academic year, which allowed us to enlist their participation in our study at the very beginning of their integration journey.

We asked them questions about their integration and their emotional well-being four times throughout the academic year. We used well-validated self-report questionnaires. Participants rated how much they agreed with statements such as, “It is important for me to develop Canadian cultural practices” or “I felt depressed.” We then tested whether integration at a given time lead to later emotional well-being, or vice versa.

What we found

• We found that immigrants who arrived with greater emotional well-being reported greater integration later on compared to those with lower emotional well-being.
• There was no evidence for the reverse direction: that integration leads to later emotional well-being.
• For organizations working with immigrants, this means considering and providing psychological support in addition to practical skills-, work- and housing-related resources.

Marina M. Doucerain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.