Feeling Attached and Feeling Accepted: Implications for Political Inclusion among Visible Minority Immigrants in Canada

Immigrants’ sense of belonging to their host communities is viewed as a core condition for their successful inclusion, but there is no consensus on which attributes of belonging are most relevant to understanding inclusion, nor is there agreement on how the sense of belonging ought to be measured empirically. This study examines how two related but independent dimensions of belonging help to better understand the political inclusion of visible minority immigrants in Canada. More specifically, it examines the role of feeling attached (immigrants’ feeling toward the host community) and the role of feeling accepted (immigrants’ sense of how their host communities feel about them). We assess the relationship between attachment, acceptance and political inclusion for both first- and second-generation visible minority Canadians; the results suggest there is analytical value in utilising separate measures of attachment and acceptance: political inclusion is more likely when both are stronger.