Conservative Immigration Policy Reform Has Not Yet Produced Any Significant Improvement in the Aggregate Labour Market Performance of Recent Immigrants

Grady, Patrick (2013): Conservative Immigration Policy Reform Has Not Yet Produced Any Significant Improvement in the Aggregate Labour Market Performance of Recent Immigrants.

Abstract

This paper examines the performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), which is an administrative database constructed by Statistics Canada by combining an administrative landing file from Citizenship and Immigration with the T1 Family File (T1FF) from the Canada Revenue Agency. As this database extends to 2010, it provides evidence on the impact on the labour market performance of recent immigrants of the relatively ambitious immigration reforms introduced by the Conservative Government. The conclusion of the paper is that the overall performance of recent immigrants has not improved enough to substantially reduce the wide earnings gap that has opened up between average recent immigrant and overall earnings. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is that the Conservative Government has continued to pursue a policy of high mass immigration admitting around 250,000 new immigrants per year right through the 2008-09 recession.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: wages, recent immigrants to Canada, immigration policy, immigrant labour, human capital
• Subjects: J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J23 - Labor Demand; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J24 - Human Capital ; Skills ; Occupational Choice ; Labor Productivity; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers > J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility ; Immigrant Workers

References

Grubel, Herbert and Patrick Grady (2012) Fiscal Transfers to Immigrants: Responding to Critics and a Revised Estimate, Vancouver, BC: The Fraser Institute.

Grubel, Herbert and Patrick Grady (2011) Immigration and the Welfare State in Canada: An Update, Vancouver, BC: The Fraser Institute.

McKenna, Barrie (2013) “Statscan halts data release over survey error,” The Globe and Mail, Aug. 12.