Image by DaDaAce via FlickrMichael Villanueva, a 36-year-old Philippines-trained engineer, arrived in Winnipeg a year ago under the provincial nominee program. He works the night shift as a maintenance man at a Winnipeg bread plant, then spends his days in a college course for electricians. He said he knew that emigrating might mean stepping down a rung professionally, but he’s still frustrated. He hopes to take a Canadian engineer’s certification exam once his English skills improve.
The connection to the Roman Catholic church – about 85 per cent of migrants are Catholic – has also been a unifying force for the community, which has simultaneously rejuvenated shrinking congregations. Outside of church, Filipino-Canadians have formed more than 1,000 ethnic associations organized around work, sports or other interests.
Having such robust community networks may be one reason Filipinos don’t tend to concentrate in neighbourhood enclaves, according to Prof. Laquian. Also, the nature of the caregiver program, which places migrants in peoples’ homes, may play a role in the community’s geographic dispersal.
In recent years, the education level of caregivers accepted as immigrants has skyrocketed. Philip Kelly, a York University geographer, said the proportion of caregivers with a university degree has risen to 63 per cent in 2009 from 5 per cent in 1993, making it an even better educated group than the skilled-worker class.
But as the human capital of newcomers has jumped, concerns have intensified about the fate of the children of previous waves. Prof. Kelly said research shows their outcomes are not what one would expect.
“In terms of statistical evidence, it looks like the story is not a happy one. Outcomes for Filipino youth are often quite poor, high levels of high-school dropouts and low levels of university graduation,” Prof. Kelly said. In Toronto, 37 per cent of first-generation Filipinos have a university degree, but that number dips to 24 per cent in the second generation, he said.
Some experts blame the struggles of the next generation on the family dislocation caused by the caregiver program. Stories of women exploited in Canada and families damaged by years of separation have surfaced more frequently in recent years.
For women such as Salve Fungo, the caregiver program is just a way-station on the path to a better life. A computer technician in the Philippines, Ms. Fungo, 36, moved to Canada in 2007. After a little more than two years caring for an elderly woman, she’s re-training as an IT specialist and embarking on the path to citizenship.
She describes it as an attractive proposition: A few years of sacrifice for life in a stable country with free health care and a salary that will allow her to send relatively vast sums home. She already paid her brother’s way through college.
“Most of my friends wanted to come here,” she said. “It’s the ‘in’ thing in the Philippines to come to Canada.”
Source: The Globe and Mail.
Where the Portuguese arrived was a place where they would do many things. The Portuguese settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, this was during 1953. After they settled, the Portuguese started to explore and later on they settled in Toronto, Galt-Cambridge, and Montreal. They started to go to those places because other people had said that there were a bigger variety of jobs to go to. They also went there because they would get paid fairly well from the jobs in these large cities. There was also cheap housing, and cheap housing helped the Portuguese a l lot because they didn’t have that much money to spend. A man by the name Manuel Cabral even brought some American people to go work for him, because he owned a job up in Canada. They fished and settled in the 
I am going to tell you when and where many first immigrants first settled. The first ever group of Portuguese immigrants that came to Canada was in 1953 and would later settled in the prairies of Ontario. Toronto, Galt-Cambridge, and Montreal had many of the first Portuguese immigrants that ever came to Canada. There were 16 700 Portuguese people that immigrated to Canada during 1958-1962, by 1963-67 that number had doubled. Over hundreds of thousands of Portuguese people immigrated to Canada during certain time periods 
