The three groups are:
- Very recent immigrants who arrived in Canada within the last five years;
- Recent immigrants who arrived in Canada over the previous five to ten years in the country; and
- Canadian-born citizens.
The comparing factors are:
- Participation rate,
- Unemployment rate,
- Employment rate, and
- Hourly wages.
Why has immigrant performance improved?
The report stated that there are six major factors which might have led to an increase in the labour-market outcomes of the new immigrants:- The strong labour-market conditions may have been more beneficial for immigrants than the Canadian-born workers;
- Majority of recent immigrants have university degrees, resulting in better productivity;
- Federal and provincial programs aimed at welcoming and integrating immigrant workers into the Canadian economy, for instance, the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) helped improve labour performance;
- Support services had helped new immigrants to integrate into the nation’s economy;
- Improved foreign credential recognition; and
- A better understanding of labour-market information may have provided the immigrant workers’ insights into the Canadian job market.
Scope of improvement for the wage rate
There were two significant reasons that have resulted in slower raises in the relative wages in comparison to the other labour-market indicators:- Challenges faced by the immigrants in Canada, including discrimination, communication gap due to language barriers, and smaller social networks may have impacted their earnings more than employment; and
- Job mismatching can be defined as working in any other occupation than in your field of study. Many university-educated people work in an occupation irrelevant to their field of study, which might have also been related to incompetence and resulted in lesser relative wages of highly-educated immigrants.
