Immigration Announcement
Children of immigrant perform better in school but a significant percentage fail in the labor market
Statistics Canada conducted a study that showed that children of immigrants have played a major role in increasing the overall level of education in Canada, enforcing the idea that immigrants benefit the country in multiple ways.
The Statistics Canada study focused on the 10-year outcomes of children aged between 13 and 17 in 2006. It revealed that the children of immigrants were educated better as compared to children with Canadian-born parents. The study author, Martin Turcotte, commented that children from an immigrant background had a higher chance of completing their post-secondary studies when compared to their non-immigrant counterparts. This trend has been established in Canada, unlike many European countries. When the study is corroborated with Canadian census data from the years 2006 and 2016, it is found that success acquired by immigrant children is highly dependent on the region of the world that their parents left behind when coming to Canada.
According to Turcotte, examining the education outcomes of children coming from an immigrant heritage based on their regions of origin can serve two purposes. It develops a finer understanding of “the unmeasured factors” that can be held responsible for the successful children, and can hence help in the creation of “targeted support programs” for the children not showing the same prowess.
The study found immigrant children were more likely to complete a postsecondary degree than young third-generation Canadians. In the case of the children aged 13 to 17 in 2006, it was found that 72% of immigrant children and 67% of third-generation Canadians had acquired post-secondary education.
The study concluded that the children of immigrants coming from East Asian countries tended to achieve a higher level of education than their grandchildren in spite of the same heritage. On the other hand, the children of immigrants belonging to regions like the Carribean and Central America had a lesser chance of completing post-secondary studies as compared to their third-generation counterparts.