Conservative Immigration Policy Reform Has Not Yet Produced Any Significant Improvement in the Aggregate Labour Market Performance of Recent Immigrants

This paper examines the performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), which is an administrative database constructed by Statistics Canada by combining an administrative landing file from Citizenship and Immigration with the T1 Family File (T1FF) from the Canada Revenue Agency. As this database extends to 2010, it provides evidence on the impact on the labour market performance of recent immigrants of the relatively ambitious immigration reforms introduced by the Conservative Government. The conclusion of the paper is that the overall performance of recent immigrants has not improved enough to substantially reduce the wide earnings gap that has opened up between average recent immigrant and overall earnings. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is that the Conservative Government has continued to pursue a policy of high mass immigration admitting around 250,000 new immigrants per year right through the 2008-09 recession.