Understanding the Economic Integration of Immigrants: A Wage Decomposition of the Earnings Disparities between Native-Born Canadians and Recent Immigrant Cohorts (original) (raw)
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Socioeconomic Disparities Among Racialized Immigrants in Canada
Springer, 2023
Canada's economic development is built through waves of migrants and immigrant labor. The Canadian labor market, however, is characterized by discriminatory divisions rooted in its history of racism. Discrimination is prejudgment and unjust treatment of individuals and groups based on socially constructed identity markers such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, and immigration status. It is the exclusion of individuals or groups from full participation in the society. This chapter focuses on two dimensions of disparity among racialized immigrants in the Canadian society: economic disparity and social disparity. This chapter begins with an introduction of immigration to Canada. The third section further substantiates the theoretical construct through an extent review of literature on socioeconomic disparities among racialized immigrants in the Canadian labour market, followed by conclusion and recommendations.
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In this paper, we investigate how visible minority and immigrant earnings gaps in Canada evolved over 1991 to 2006. Immigrant disparity changes with the duration of residence in Canada, so we evaluate disparity at 5 years in Canada, that is for relatively recent immigrants. We find that, overall, visible minority-and immigrant-based earnings disparity increased substantially over the 15 year period. This pattern is observed broadly for both men and women, in Canada as a whole and in each of its three largest CMAs, for most white and visible minority immigrant groups, and for most Canadian-born visible minority ethnic groups. The decline in relative earnings is large: it is on the order of 20 percentage points for both white and visible minority immigrants and on the order of 10 percentage points for Canadian-born visible minority workers.
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The current study examines the importance of country of origin in predicting the labour market earnings among recent immigrants to Canada. The authors argue that, in addition to individual-level characteristics associated with immigrant capital, macro-level features associated with immigrant origins must be taken into account when considering the economic performance of immigrants in their host country. Country-level factors are said to accompany immigrants to their destination country, which generate disparities in the “quality” of immigrants’ human and social capital across origin groups, as well as differences in how they are received by the resident population. The present study uses random effects multilevel modelling to investigate the extent to which immigrant incomes vary randomly across source country while taking into consideration individual-level characteristics selected on the basis of human capital, social capital, and discrimination theories. Multilevel regression analysis confirms that immigrant incomes indeed vary significantly by country of origin, though the effect is small. Furthermore, it is revealed that the gross domestic product (GDP) of the sending country explains much of the level 2 variability in the labour market earnings of recent immigrants, as well as the relationship between racial minority status and immigrant incomes. The practical significance and policy implications of these findings are discussed.
We examine whether the factors associated with the rise in the Canadian born - immigrant entry earnings gap played different roles in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s. We find that for recent immigrant men, shifts in population characteristics had the most important effect in the 1980s when their earnings gap expanded the most, but this “compositional†effect diminished in the 1990s and early 2000s. The effect of changes in returns to Canadian experience and education was small for men, but stronger for women in all three periods. During the early 2000s the IT bust, combined with a heavy concentration of immigrants in IT-related occupations, was the primary explanation of the increase in their earnings gap. Furthermore, returns to foreign experience declined in the 1980s and 1990s, but recovered moderately in the early 2000s. In contrast, the relative return to immigrant education declined in the early 2000s.
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1989
This paper reports estimates of simple wage equations fit to cross-sectional and pseudo-longitudinal data for Canadian immigrants in the 1971 and 1981 Canadian censuses. The estimates are used to assess (1) the usefulness of crosssectional analyses for measuring the pace of immigrant earnings growth, (2) the labor market implications of admissions policies that place different weights on the work skills possessed by prospective entrants, and (3) the relative impact of selective outmigration and job-matching on the shape of immigrant earnings distributions as duration of stay increases. The estimates provide evidence of a small to moderate assimilation effect that suggests that immigrants make up for relatively low entry wages, although the wage catch-up is not complete until 13 to 22 years after entry into Canada. These results are revealed clearly in both the pseudo-longitudinal and the cross-sectional analyses. The estimates also provide evidence that the unobserved quality of immigrants' labor market skills declined following changes in Canada's immigration policies in 1974 that led to a sharp increase in the proportion of immigrants admitted on the basis of family ties. Finally, since there is no evidence that the variance of immigrant earnings increases with their duration of stay in Canada, and since there are no differential immigrant-native changes in higher-order moments of the earnings distribution as duration of stay increases, the results are inconclusive with respect to the importance of selective outmigration and job matching in the evolution of immigrant earnings distributions over time.
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This paper examines income inequality between cohorts of immigrant workers and native workers in the Canadian labour force. The degree of inequality is measured by the decomposable Theil generalized entropy measures. We provide comparisons of the patterns of inequality among immigrant status groups and a treatment of trends realized over the 1990s. The primary results indicate that the degree of income inequality between natives and immigrants is positive but not important in magnitude, and it remained stable over much of the 1990s. The structure of income differentials associated with education levels and age groups appear to be roughly similar within immigrant groups and for Canadian-born workers. The findings also indicate that the degree of income equality within the cohort of immigrants that arrived after 1981 is much higher than the degree within the Canadian-born labour force or within the cohort of immigrants that arrived before 1981.
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Journal of Sociological Research, 2012
Using data from the 2001 Census of Canada, this study examines gender variations in the socioeconomic attainment of immigrants in Canada aged 30-40. Multivariate regression analysis was carried out to test the research hypotheses. In general, the study finds that male immigrants in Canada aged 30-40 in 2001 are likely to have higher educational attainment, higher occupational prestige and higher income attainment than female immigrants of the same age group, even after controlling for human capital variables. A similar gender differential pattern in socioeconomic attainment also prevails across various subgroups of immigrants based on marital status and region of birth. The study finds evidence in support of the theory of discrimination rather than the theory of human capital, and it explores the possible implications of these findings.
The Changing Labour Market Position of Canadian Immigrants
The Canadian Journal of Economics, 1995
Canadian census data to evaluate the extent to which the earnings of Canadian immigrants at the time of immigration fall short of the earnings of comparable Canadian-born individuals, and (2) immigrants' earnings grow more rapidly over time than those of the Canadianborn. Variations in the labor market assimilation of immigrants according to their gender and country of origin are also analyzed. The results suggest that recent immigrant cohorts have had more difficulty being assimilated into the Canadian labor market than earlier ones, an apparent consequence of recent changes in Canadian immigration policy, labor market discrimination against visible minorities, and the prolonged recession of the early 1980s.