Immigration options to Toronto

Unless you travelled by foot to another country, immigration entails a lot of resources. This means a lot of risk for the immigrant. Of course, this great risk is taken with a lot of hopes and dreams. However, this risk can be managed with information prior to immigration.

This article briefly covers the contents found in this project paper: https://github.com/gtq/Coursera_Capstone/blob/master/Battle_of_Neighborhoods_Capstone_Project.ipynb.

Traditionally, immigrants consider employment as a primary option and source of income when immigrating to a new country. However, this project takes a twist on this question and explores immigration as an entrepreneur.

What I found in this exercise was a further twist to the question. There are three typical options. Firstly, there is the traditional route of employment (nothing wrong with this route by the way if this works for you). Secondly, there is the capital-backed entrepreneurial immigrant who seeks to immigrate with the goal of expanding business returns. Thirdly, there is the survival entrepreneur. This is a kind of entrepreneur proposed by Chrysostome in her paper. People who have no access to formal capital but have challenges in getting employment find their way into this category.

Since, we are talking about entrepreneurs, we followed the money as an approach to learn about immigration to Toronto. It’s been an interesting exploration where we wanted to use business registrations but this mechanism works a little differently in Canada because there is the provincial registration and the federal registration. So we wound up following the food businesses and found verification of places of employment because a lot of employees probably don’t prepare their own lunches.

In the project paper we are able to see the typical income for individuals per community, the typical cost of rent, the industry sectors that employed the most. For would be entrepreneurs, we see patterns of business registrations in different areas which would help in giving a feel for the different areas on the ground.

There are a lot of factors required for successful immigration but we looked at the basics: food, income, employment and shelter/rent. Hopefully, this may one day find some use to someone immigrating.