| Until recently, research into the economic integration of immigrants has typically been driven by the human capital model, while the role of contextual factors in determining how well immigrants fare in their host labour market has largely been overlooked. As such, relatively little is known about the ways in which immigrant origins and destinations determine the extent to which they are able to successfully integrate into their local economy. This study attempts to fill noticeable gaps in the literature by investigating the macro-level factors that affect the labour market integration of immigrants in Canada, with a specific emphasis on the institutions of the destination city.;Findings from this study demonstrate that the economic integration of immigrants is shaped, in part, by macro-level factors associated with origins and destinations. Immigrants from more highly developed, English- and French-speaking countries tend to fare better in the labour market than those arriving from less developed countries and from regions in which neither English nor French is a dominant language. Further, English-speaking immigrants living in smaller Canadian cities and those settling in regions with a larger proportion of recent immigrants tend to have earnings that are closer to those of the native-born. On the other hand, French-speaking immigrants tend to fare better in larger cities and in areas with fewer recent immigrants. The practical implications for existing immigration policy, settlement programs, and efforts to redistribute newcomers across Canada are discussed.;Keywords: Immigrants, economic integration, labour market outcomes, Canada, Canadian cities, human capital, country of origin, immigrant destinations, social distance, hierarchical linear models (HLM).;Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, the 2006 Census of Population, the World Bank, and the CIA World Factbook, hierarchical linear models are used to estimate the separate and combined effects of individual, source country, and destination level variables on two measures of economic integration: immigrant earnings and the wage gap between the foreign-born and the native-born. In addition to the direct impact of macro-level factors, cross-level interactions are used to analyze whether returns to human capital vary by immigrant origins and destinations. |
