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In the hope of addressing chronic labour shortages and sluggish economic growth, the Canadian government plans to increase immigration in the coming years to per capita levels not reached since the 1920s. We argue that economic immigration in the Canadian context should aim to boost GDP per capita in the full population including the newcomers. We then examine the potential for increases in Canadian immigration levels to achieve this objective. Our analysis suggests that Canada is not well-positioned to leverage heightened immigration to boost GDP per capita owing primarily to weak capital investment and quantity-quality tradeoffs in immigrant selection. We conclude by providing a framework for identifying the optimal level of economic immigration.

Despite repeated efforts to curtail its size, we show that Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Programs have undergone a transformation since 2000, in which TFWs now account for nearly three percent of total Canadian employment - a six-fold increase - and are increasingly skilled, employed on long-term permits, and likely to transition to permanent residency (PR). While TFW entries that are labour market tested appear to be meeting genuine labour shortages, 85 percent are exempt from labour market tests (LMTs) and the growth in LMT-exempt permits has exceeded the growth in TFWs who transition to PR status. We argue that the system requires greater transparency in identifying the locations and occupations of TFWs with LMT-exempt permits and in tracking their PR transition rates.

We examine data from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. to inform the potential for immigrant screening policies to influence the labour market performance of skilled immigrants. Our estimates point to improvements in employment rates and weekly earnings of male university-educated immigrants in all three countries concomitant with skilled immigration policy reforms. Nonetheless, the gains are modest in comparison to a substantial and persistent performance advantage of U.S. skilled immigrants. Given that there is increasingly little to distinguish the skilled immigration policies of these countries, we interpret the U.S. advantage as primarily reflecting the relative positive selectivity of U.S. immigrants.

We examine the effect of changes in skilled-immigrant population shares in 98 Canadian cities between 1981 and 2006 on per capita patents. The Canadian case is of interest because its 'points system' for selecting immigrants is viewed as a model of skilled immigration policy. Our estimates suggest unambiguously smaller beneficial impacts of increasing the university-educated immigrant population share than comparable U.S. estimates, whereas our estimates of the contribution of Canadian-born university graduates are virtually identical in magnitude to the U.S. estimates. The modest contribution of Canadian immigrants to innovation is, in large part, explained by the low employment rates of Canadian STEM-educated immigrants in STEM jobs. Our results point to the value of providing employers with a role in the immigrant screening process.

Canada is increasingly looking to international students as a source of postsecondary tuition revenues and new immigrants. By 2014, international students accounted for 10% of graduates from Canadian postsecondary institutions, up from 3% in 2000, and 11% of new permanent residents, up from 7% in 2010. This article compares the labour market performance of former international students (FISs) entering the Canadian labour market during the first decade of the 2000s to their Canadian-born-and-educated (CBE) and foreign-born-and-educated (FBE) counterparts. We find that FISs outperform FBE immigrants by a substantial margin and un- derperform CBE individuals graduating from similar academic programs by a relatively modest margin. We also find some limited evidence, particularly among women, of a deterioration in FIS outcomes through the 2000s relative to both comparison groups. We argue that this de- terioration is consistent with a quality tradeoff as postsecondary institutions and governments have reached deeper into international student pools to meet their demands for students and new immigrants without a commensurate increase in their supply.

Research comparing the labour market performance of recent cohorts of immigrants to Australia and Canada points to superior employment and earnings outcomes in Australia. Examining Australian and Canadian Census data between 1986 and 2006, we find that this performance advantage is not driven by differences in broader structural and macroeconomic labour market conditions affecting all new labour market entrants. Rather, the results from comparing immigrants from a common source country { either the UK, India, or China { suggest that the advantage, particularly in earnings, primarily reflects a difference in the source country distribution of Australian immigrants. Moreover, the recent tightening of Australian selection policy, most notably its use of mandatory pre-migration English-language testing, appears to be having an effect primarily by further shifting the source country distribution of immigrants away from non-English-speaking source countries, rather than in identifying higher-quality migrants within source countries.

We compare predicted relative immigrant wage profiles based on returns to YSM and to foreign and host-country sources of schooling and experience. We find the biases inherent in inferring assimilation from a return to YSM appear more substantial than those emanating from the assumptions necessary to estimate foreign and host-country returns directly using standard data sources. Given the policy relevance of allowing entry effects and subsequent wage growth to depend on the foreign human capital immigrants bring and their post-migration schooling and work decisions, our findings suggest the predominance of YSM models in the literature is not well founded.

Evidence from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) reveals that the percentage of employed workers searching for other jobs more than doubled in Canada between 1976 and 1995. Comparable evidence from the Current Population Survey (CPS), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) suggests that the U.S. experienced a remarkably similar upward trend in on-the-job search (OJS) over this period. Using U.S. data to supplement the Canadian data wherever possible, this paper attempts to explain this long-term, secular trend in Canadian OJS rates by performing decomposition and industry-level analyses, and by considering concomitant changes in employer-to-employer transition rates and the wage returns to job changing. The results from both countries suggest that an important part of the upward trend in OJS rates is not explained by compositional effects, including cohort effects. The OJS increase seems also to have occurred independently of rising job insecurity due to sector-specific demand shocks and trends in the dispersion of log wage residuals. The data are most consistent with a long-term decrease in search costs.

Des donnees tirees de l'Enquete sur la population active (EPA) montrent que le pourcentage de travailleurs occupes cherchant un autre emploi a plus que double au Canada entre 1976 et 1995. Des donnees comparables tirees de la Current Population Survey (CPS), de la Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) et de la National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) semblent indiquer que les Etats-Unis ont connu une tendance a la hausse remarquablement semblable au cours de cette periode en ce qui a trait aux taux de recherche d'emploi en cours d'emploi (RECE). En utilisant des donnees americaines pour completer les donnees canadiennes chaque fois ou cela est possible, nous essayons d'expliquer dans la presente communication cette tendance generale a long terme observee dans les taux de RECE au Canada, notamment en effectuant une decomposition et des analyses au niveau des industries ainsi qu'en prenant en consideration des variations concomitantes observees dans les taux de transition d'employeur a employeur et dans les avantages salariaux lies au changement d'emploi. Les resultats obtenus dans l'examen des donnees relatives aux deux pays laissent penser qu'une partie importante de la tendance a la hausse des taux de RECE ne s'explique pas par des effets de composition, y compris les effets de cohorte. L'augmentation de la RECE semble egalement s'etre produite de maniere independante de la hausse de l'insecurite en matiere d'emploi due a des variations brusques de la demande dans des secteurs precis et des tendances relatives a la dispersion des valeurs salariales logarithmiques residuelles. Les donnees examinees concordent le plus avec une diminution a long terme des couts de la recherche d'emploi.

Dans cette etude, on examine les raisons qui expliquent la diminution des salaires et traitements des nouveaux immigrants au Canada.

The study explores reasons for the declining wages and salaries of new immigrants to Canada.