According to Eastman Immigrant Services total immigration numbers in 2016 are down slightly from previous years.

Program Director Richard Harder says the average year would see approximately 280 families move to the Southeast and in 2016 there was a total of 263. He notes the dip in immigration does not come as much of a surprise.

"There could be many reasons for that. We all know that in 2015 and also at the beginning of 2016 the government was talking about focusing on refugees, so that sort of delayed the application for other streams and also the input that was put into other streams so it makes perfect sense."

Harder says the average size of immigrant families is also getting smaller leading to lower overall numbers. He notes when he started in the settlement sector 14 years ago, immigrants came from between three and four different countries each year and most families were from Germany.

"Today we have about 44 different nationalities represented in one year, but we are seeing that definitely, the family size is smaller. When we say family intake, it could be an individual, could be husband and wife, could be husband and wife with one child, years ago that tended to be husband and wife with six to twelve children"

Harder notes in 2015 a total of 646 individual immigrants moved to the Southeast and in 2016 that number was 583. He says for the second year in a row the Philippines is the number one country of origin for immigration. He says even though total immigration numbers are down some, refugee numbers are up in the southeast.

"This is a banner year for refugee arrivals. Previous years we would have had anywhere between zero and four refugee families, this year we had nine refugee families and that reflects what the government was saying is that they want to focus more on refugees. I am anticipating this will continue."

Harder says there is continued interest in the community for refugee sponsorship and some group's sponsorship applications from 2016 are still being processed, so this coming year will most likely also see high numbers of refugee arrivals.