The Pitfalls of Ethnic Aggregation: Iranians And Afghans, And The Problem Of 'West Asian' Category In Canada

In the Canadian community of official statistics producers and users, there has been an ongoing debate about the feasibility of using 'visible minority' categories to capture the experiences of Canada's racial minorities. Rarely, however, has this issue been examined from a factual angle; that is, the success of those categories in capturing the experiences of the groups they represent, without suppressing the diversity behind each category in a misleading way. In this study, we have used the latter approach in examining the feasibility of the visible minority category of 'West Asian', which is often used to refer to the Canadians of Iranian and Afghan origins, using Statistics Canada's confidential microdata files from the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), the General Social Survey (GSS), and the Census of Population. Through this multi-source quantitative analysis, the study compares the two groups across several key dimensions: human capital characteristics, religious identity and experiences, income levels, and labour market outcomes. By showing how this category obscures meaningful intragroup differences, this paper not only contributes to the growing bodies of literature on Iranians and Afghans in Canada but also highlights a need for more nuanced and intersectional approaches to understanding the experiences of minorities.