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This highly organized, intentional arrival city is a new kind of place, a half-solution to a crisis in North America, in which the neighborhoods most amenable to receiving new migrants—the dense, poor neighborhoods of the urban core—have become sufficiently developed and improved by previous waves of arrivals that the newest migrants are being pushed to the outer suburbs. In cities like Toronto the process of urban acculturation was, for a century, a largely spontaneous and migrant-driven experience. As a result, governments are only now learning that they need to take a role in urban transition—and often learn this too late.

Toronto may be the world’s most complete collection of these old-style arrival cities. Its metropolitan area of 6.5 million has one of the highest immigrant intakes in the Western world: Of the approximately 300,000 foreigners who immigrate each year into Canada (population 33 million), more than 40 percent set down in Toronto. For a century, this immigration was strictly village in origin and followed a classic North American pattern of chain migration. Immigrants from specific villages and regions would move into certain streets, blocks, neighborhoods, and districts, colonizing undesirable low-rent quarters filled with Victorian row housing, building networks of mutual support, setting up strings of shops and small factories, buying and improving the housing stock, using mortgages and property as sources of capital, then moving uptown into more expensive enclaves, ethnic or otherwise, and servicing the next wave of arrivals as landlords and entrepreneurs. I lived for decades among these enclaves of Chinese, Indian, Italian, Portuguese, Caribbean, Korean, Greek, and Pakistani villagers; within their ethnic districts, they built entire class structures and webs of business, their own finance, travel, and media institutions, their own influential elites. Those who succeeded would sometimes stay and improve their housing and sometimes move out of the ethnic downtown districts into ethnoburbs, forming “wedges” of ethnic concentration extending outward from the arrival point. This cycle of mutual assistance has created a true arrival-city middle class whose interests tend to dominate political policy at the provincial and federal levels, making the process of arrival a central and continual issue of Canadian politics, regardless which party is in power, as much as it is in Brazil or Turkey.16

That old pattern of settlement is no longer dominant. Some new waves of migrants do continue to move into the old arrival cities of the urban core, which still offer much rental accommodation: Portuguese neighborhoods develop enclaves of migrants from Angola and Mozambique; the Chinese owners rent to the Vietnamese, who, in turn, build up their own enclaves farther north. But the greatest share of migrant arrival, including large numbers of rural-origin groups, is now in the fringes of the city, in neighborhoods built to be 1950s-style bedroom suburbs for car-borne commuters. Studies show the city becoming an island of established-immigrant prosperity, surrounded by thick bands of physically isolated poverty.17 These neighborhoods often suffer from all the physical-design, zoning, and transportation problems of Slotervaart, with the potential for similar social problems (an elaborate Islamist terror plot was intercepted by police in 2006 centered in Meadowvale, Mississauga, one such isolated arrival-city bedroom community). Thorncliffe Park offers one solution to this problem: a high-rise neighborhood engineered to be a place of rapid, well-managed transition, at considerable expense. It is, unfortunately, an exception.

We can no longer expect the Western arrival city to form and manage itself spontaneously. The immigrant waves of the early twentieth century and the postwar years—the last waves of the first great flood of rural–urban migration, mainly from Europe—coincided with a great expansion of public spending on education,