Canadian Immigration: Economic Evidence for a Dynamic Policy Environment (review)

Since the 1970s, Canadian immigration policy has experienced dramatic reforms in the dynamic context of deteriorating labour market outcomes of recent immigrants and a rapidly changing social and economic environment in the global arena. As immigration “has evolved beyond being an important economic and social policy to become a part of our national identity” (p. 2), solid empirical evidence based on vigorous economic analysis is urgently needed for policy evaluation and advancement. Canadian Immigration: Economic Evidence for a Dynamic Policy Environment serves this vital purpose.

In this book, a group of economists used micro-data from Statistics Canada to investigate a range of dynamic and complex immigration issues: immigrants’ employment experience, payoff to schooling, immigrant entry earnings, demographic characteristics and immigrant earnings, self-employment propensities, labour market outcomes of spouses, ethnoracial differentiation of home ownership, children’s school outcomes, household fertility decisions, and changes in immigrant health status.

The authors of the 12 chapters in the book are leading researchers in the field from Canada, United States, and Australia. While the chapters in this volume each stand alone as a strong contribution to the relevant research area, together they provide an important collection of research on the broad topic of immigrants and their involvement in the Canadian economy. By employing various data sets and econometric models, these analyses provide important insight on the key topics of interest and expand the evidence base for economic and social outcomes of immigration in Canada through comparison to other countries.

The econometric models are solid and data sources are reliable. Regarding the specific data sources, each chapter employs one or more databases of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, Census of Canada, Longitudinal Immigration Database, Survey of Consumer Finances, Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, and Third International Math and Science Survey.

What makes this book interesting to read is the variation and versatility of the authors’ analyses where they interpret the effectiveness and impact of immigration in a wide economic and social context. The book contributes to the literature on the deteriorating labour market outcomes of recent immigrants and evidence-based policy development in the domain of immigration. Chapters 2–8 interpret the earnings of recent immigrants; specifically, Chapter 2 indicates increasing earnings and job satisfaction over time across the immigration classes in Canada (Xue); Chapter 3 suggests lower payoff to schooling for immigrants compared to Canadian-born (Chiswick and Miler); Chapter 4 finds that foreign experience recognition plays an important role in entry earnings, and that entry earnings would have been even lower in the absence of the resulting shift in educational composition during the 1990s (Green and Worswick). Chapter 5 illustrates the pronounced declines in entry earnings for more recent arrivals from certain groups (especially Chinese and South Asians) and strong returns to Canadian work experience (Mcdonald and Worseick). Chapter 6 compares the self-employment propensities in Canada and in the United States and finds that the assimilation process in Canada was not stable between 1971 and 2001 (Schuetze). Chapter 7 finds that the labour market outcomes of spouses appear poorer than expected based on the characteristics of spouses as measured by the point system (Sweetman and Warman). Chapter 8 studies temporary foreign workers and finds that they face no difficulty transferring their foreign human capital, unlike landed immigrants (Warman). These eight chapters focus on various aspects of labour market outcomes of immigrants, and together shed light on the effectiveness of the immigrant selection system and subsequent immigrant labour market integration.

While the book advances the debate with respect to immigrant labour market outcomes, it also extends our understanding of the challenges that some immigrants face in terms of purchasing a home (Haan), and provides insight into the school performance of immigrant children in Canada compared to those in the United States and Australia (Sweetman). These studies are relevant not only for...