June 29, 2020
By Shelby Thevenot, Canadian Immigration News
Immigrants are having better outcomes in the Canadian labour market, in some instances, they are performing better than Canadian-born workers.
New immigrants are on average younger and better educated than Canadian-born workers in the labour market, according to a recent report titled, The Improved Labour Market Performance of New Immigrants to Canada, 2006-2019.
Economist Kimberly Wong compared the participation rate, employment rate, unemployment rate, and hourly wages of three groups: very recent immigrants who had been in Canada for less than five years; recent immigrants who had five to 10 years in the country; and Canadian-born citizens. The data was collected from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Study between 2006 and 2019 and published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
Though immigrants had a higher participation rate and employment rate, there was still a wage gap and higher unemployment rates.
Immigrants had a higher participation rate and employment rate than Canadian-born workers by the end of the 13 year period.
By 2019 immigrant participation rates surpassed the Canadian-born by 4.5 percentage points for very recent immigrants and 10.0 percentage points for recent immigrants. The employment rates of very recent immigrants exceeded the rate of Canadian-born workers by 1.5 percentage points and recent immigrants surpassed them by 8.7 percentage points.
Unemployment rates decreased for immigrants, but they were still higher than Canadian-born workers. By 2019 the unemployment rates of both very recent and recent immigrants were greater than the rate of the Canadian-born by 4.0 and 1.0 percentage points, respectively.
Wages adjusted for the cost of living for very recent immigrants grew, but they were still earning between $2.87 and $4.32 dollars per hour less than the Canadian born.