Maghrebi Immigration to Montréal

Maghrebi immigrants first arrived in Montréal in small numbers in the 1950s, and then in large waves from the 1990s onward. Today, the Maghrebi community in Montréal is made up mostly of people of Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan descent. 

A nascent Maghrebi community

Ali Benfaka

MEM - Centre des mémoires montréalaises

In the 1960s, Québec and Canada began to compete with each other for economic, political, and cultural influence in the Maghreb. Expo 67 increased Québec’s visibility in the region. A number of North Africans visited the World’s Fair with official delegations and as tourists, and many were charmed by Montréal. In the years after Expo, Maghrebi students, entrepreneurs, and artists immigrated to the city. Researchers have described this cohort as électrons libres (free electrons); they tended to disperse across the city instead of settling in clusters.

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Photo : Serge Emmanuel Jongué. Collectif des femmes immigrantes du Québec.

 In this period as well, Québec authorities began prioritizing French-speaking immigrants. The policy shift was favourable to prospective emigrants from the Maghreb, whose knowledge of the language promised to facilitate integration. A few decades later, the 2011 census showed that more than 96% of people of Maghrebi origin living in Québec spoke French, with 30.8% of them reporting French as their mother tongue. 

The first cohorts of Muslim Maghrebi came to the city in the 1970s. By 1981, the modest Maghrebi community in Québec, mainly settled in Montréal, consisted of about 5,000 people. But in the 1980s, cooperation agreements in the education sector attracted a large number of Algerian students to Montréal and other Québec communities. Political and social instability and the rise of fundamentalism also spurred emigration; in all, about 4,000 Maghrebi arrived in Montréal during the decade.

A massive wave of immigration in the 1990s and 2000s

Maghreb - Hafida

Photo: Serge Emmanuel Jongué. Collectif des femmes immigrantes du Québec.

North African immigration to Montréal has intensified since the 1990s and is predominantly Muslim. While Moroccans and Tunisians came in the 1990s to study, Algerian newcomers immigrated under more difficult circumstances. Algeria had become engulfed in conflicts that culminated in a bloody civil war in 1992. In the exodus that followed, large numbers of Algerian asylum seekers arrived in Montréal. 

A major cohort of immigrants from the Maghreb chose to live in Montréal in the 2000s. In 2001, the City of Montréal was home to 17,940 Algerians, 25,815 Moroccans, and 5,040 Tunisians, for a total of 48,795. By 2011, this population had increased to 90,630 in the agglomeration of Montréal. But while they had a high level of education and were proficient in French, a Statistics Canada survey showed that 20% of Maghrebi immigrants were unemployed in Québec in 2006.

Opting for Montréal and its suburbs

Maghreb - Coupe du monde

Dom Bernier’s personal collection

Since 2001, the Maghreb has been the third-largest recruitment pool for immigrants to Québec. The vast majority of Maghrebi immigrants in Québec live in the Montréal area. According to the 2006 census, there were 80,330 people of Maghrebi descent [AJ1] in Québec, of whom 71,945 resided in the Montréal census metropolitan area, a region including the island of Montréal and its surrounding suburbs. The City of Montréal was home to 51,490 people of Maghrebi descent.  

The Maghrebi presence was distributed across several Montréal neighbourhoods in 2011: 56.2% of Montrealers of Maghrebi descent resided in Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Côte-des-Neiges—NDG, Saint-Laurent, Saint-Léonard, and Villeray—Saint-Michel—Parc Extension. Moroccan Montrealers were more numerous in Côte-des-Neiges, but they also lived in Saint-Laurent, Saint-Léonard, and Montréal Nord, while Algerian Montrealers were clustered in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville sector and Saint-Michel.