Canadian Immigration Policy in the Early 1990s: A Commentary on Vaugelers and Klassen's Analysis of the Breakdown in the Unemployment-Immigration Linkage.

The article presents comments of the author on the article "Continuity and Change in Canada's Unemployment-Immigration Linkage," by John W.P. Veugelers and Thomas R. Klassen. Veugelers and Klassen's paper makes an important contribution by confirming in detail three findings on Canadian immigration policy that have been noted only more casually and less clearly in previous studies. In this commentary on their paper, I seek to clarify the significance of their findings and to set forth some important issues and hypotheses which are not covered in their interpretation. One major finding in the Veugelers and Klassen paper concerns the role of unemployment trends in the "tap-on tap-off' pattern of Canadian immigration levels over the post-War period up until 1990. The paper presents the most careful analysis to date of the way in which annual immigration targets have tended to rise in periods of falling unemployment and to drop in periods of increasing unemployment. A second major finding clearly documents and confirms the way actual immigration levels tend to closely follow state immigration targets. As the authors note, the preceding two findings are consistent with the hypothesis that, over the period 1946-1989, Canadian immigration targets and actual arrivals were determined annually by Federal policy makers who relied significantly on unemployment trends as a barometer of emerging pressure and criticism they faced from capital and labor.