New immigrants are fitting into the Canadian labour market with more ease

A new report titled, The Improved Labour Market Performance of New Immigrants to Canada, 2006-2019, found that new immigrants have seen significant improvement in their performance in the Canadian labor market between 2006 and 2019.

The study found that immigrants tend to be younger and more educated as compared to Canadian-born workers in the labor market on an average. Not only are Canadian immigrants experiencing better outcomes in the labor market, but they are also doing better than Canadian-born workers in some cases.

Reputed economist, Kimberly Wong, took factors such as employment rate, participation rate, unemployment rate, and hourly wages when conducting the study on three groups. The groups were divided as per the following:

• Very recent immigrants living in Canada for less than five years
• Immigrants who spent 5 to 10 years in Canada
• Native Canadian-born citizens

Data breakdown:

All the data was sourced from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Study that was released by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards between 2006 and 2019. Immigrants recorded a higher employment rate and participation rate overall, but there were concerns such as a significant wage gap and high unemployment rates. The participation rate, as well as the employment rate of immigrants, was higher than workers born in Canada during these 13 years.

The immigrant participation rates have crossed those of Canadian-born workers by 4.5 percentage points for the most recent immigrants and by 10.0 percentage points for the second group. Very recent immigrants had higher employment rates than Canadian-born workers, surpassing them by 1.5 percentage points. On the other hand, the employment rate of recent immigrants has surpassed the native Canadian workers by 8.7 percentage points.

While the unemployment rate has fallen for immigrants, it is still higher as compared to Canadian-born workers. The unemployment rates of very recent as well as recent immigrants were higher than the rates recorded for Canadian-born workers by 2019.