1 For nearly every pupil at Marvin Heights public school, English is a second or third language.
2 The school, which is bursting at the seams, offers Punjabi dance classes as well as a breakfast program. At the annual barbecue, the principal dishes up samosas and hot dogs.
3 Marvin Heights sounds like a typical downtown school with a high proportion of new immigrants. But it is part of the Peel board of education, the largest public school board in Canada, in the suburbs just west of Toronto.
4 In a switch from traditional settlement patterns, many new immigrants to Canada are not moving to the downtown city cores but are flocking to the suburbs.
5 Every year about 20,000 people arrive in Peel Region, making it the second fastest growing regional municipality in Canada between 1986 and 1991 (behind York Region, just north of Toronto).
6 Many of those newcomers are new to Canada, says Statistics Canada. In 1992, about 10 per cent of the new immigrants in Ontario, 14,000 people, settled in Peel, often just a few kilometres from where they got off the plane at Pearson International Airport.
7 In nearby Malton, immigrants find shops, social service agencies and temples where their language is spoken. Even the local member of Parliament, Gurbax Malhi, is an immigrant from India.
8 Just a few kilometres north, in Brampton, the ubiquitous plazas have sari shops, Caribbean grocery stores and video outlets offering the latest movies from India.
9 'People still have the illusion that Brampton or Mississauga is still a traditional suburban community. It isn't,' says Harold Brathwaite, director of the Peel board of education.
10 Of all the suburban regions ringing Metropolitan Toronto, Peel has the highest proportion of visible minorities.
11 About one-quarter of the region's 700,000 residents are members of a visible minority, the same proportion as in Vancouver and second only to that of Metro Toronto. About 36 per cent of Peel's population was not born in Canada, according to the 1991 census.
12 Peel -- an amalgamation of Mississauga, Canada's ninth-largest city, Brampton and Caledon -- was created 20 years ago. Since then, it has undergone several major transitions, says Paula DeCoito, director of the region's social planning council.
13 Apple orchards and dairy farms have been paved over and most of the region has become an urban, multicultural and multiracial society.
14 Ethnic diversity has taken Peel by surprise. Suddenly, school boards, the police and social service agencies are scrambling as they realize they cannot even communicate with large segments of the community.
15 'There is a lag between the ideology of the leadership and the social reality. They're good people, but their ideas have got to go through that transition,' DeCoito said.
16 Pearson Airport and the industries that have grown up around it are a magnet for new immigrants. The region's stock of new, single-family housing is also more attractive than Toronto's older houses and highrises.
17 In the city of Mississauga (which includes Malton), 27 per cent of the population are members of visible-minority groups, while in Brampton 23 per cent are classified as such. In Caledon, the most affluent and rural of the three communities, just three per cent are visible minorities.
18 Every shift in Canadian immigration policy has changed the mix of who ends up living in Mississauga's suburban cul-de-sacs.
19 In the early 1970s, when Canada instituted a neutral point system to evaluate potential newcomers, Asian, African and Caribbean immigrants were accepted in larger numbers. At the same time, as Europe became more prosperous, the number of white European immigrants began to decline.
20 In 1981, Britain was still ranked first as the country of last permanent residence for newcomers to Peel. By 1993, the primary source countries were India, the Philippines, Poland, Hong Kong and Jamaica. Britain wasn't even in the top 10.
21 Because Canada's immigration policy has put a high priority on family reunification, once one member of a family legally enters Canada, relatives can soon follow.
22 Much of the growth of the Sikh population has come from families joining relatives in the region, said Manohar Singh Bal, secretary of the Ontario Council of Sikhs.
23 South Asians have become the biggest visible minority group in Peel, slightly more than one-third of the total visible minority population. Blacks, many of whom are first-generation immigrants from the Caribbean, make up about one-quarter.
24 Filipinos and Chinese each constitute about 10 per cent.
25 Statistics Canada says 11 per cent of the region's population are neither Catholic nor Protestant, with the largest groups being 21,300 Sikhs, 18,665 Hindus and 17,000 Muslims.

The school , which is bursting at the seams , offers Punjabi dance classes as well as a breakfast program . At the annual barbecue , the principal dishes up samosas and hot dogs .
bursting at the seams ,
How over crowded is it?