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Using the native born as a benchmark, we examine immigrants' reliance on Canada's social safety net. Both in the raw data, and after conditioning on a variety of explanatory variables, we find that immigrants have lower participation rates in Unemployment Insurance and Social Assistance than natives. We also find that "assimilation'' leads to greater participation in both these programs. There is a correlation of entry participation and vintage which indicates more recent immigrant cohorts hare higher recipiency rates than their predecessors, holding years in the country constant. The results for Social Assistance contrast with U.S. evidence that the raw entry participation rates of many immigrant cohorts exceed the native rates. Finally, our analysis of rent subsidies tells a different story, in which immigrants initially have higher rates of participation which fall with assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine the economic assimilation of immigrants to Canada. We provide new evidence on immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and document an increase in the dispersion of labor market outcomes across immigrants of different vintages over time. Our results confirm U.S. evidence of "permanent" differences across immigrant cohorts. What distinguishes the Canadian experience is small or negative rates of assimilation for most cohorts over the sample period. Finally, we test the overidentification of the assimilation process specified in previous studies and fail to reject the usual cohort fixed-effect specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]