The economic integration of recent immigrants to Canada: A longitudinal analysis of dimensions of employment success

The employment success of immigrants to Canada has been a primary focus of sociological research on immigrant integration. However, much of this research has examined the concept of "employment success" solely in terms of earnings. Studies that focus on whether immigrants obtain employment matching their desired or pre-migration occupations provide inadequate measures of this aspect of employment success by examining whether or not immigrants obtain employment in their desired occupations at a very broad level (e.g. a skill type match). In addition, the majority of quantitative analyses use cross-sectional data to examine the economic integration of immigrants in Canada. The following research tests hypotheses which examine the relationships that various ascribed, human capital, and occupational characteristics have with multiple dimensions of employment success for a cohort of recent immigrants during their first two years in Canada (2001 to 2003). Longitudinal analyses of several dimensions of the employment success of recent immigrants are conducted with the use of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada. These "dimensions" include an examination of the likelihood that an immigrant will obtain employment in his or her intended occupation, or a "job match", at some point during his or her first two years in Canada, the rate at which he or she obtains a job match during this time, and the change in his or her occupational prestige scores and wages between jobs. A case study of immigrant engineers is also presented, providing some insight into the employment success of immigrants seeking employment in regulated professions. Human capital theory, the theory of discrimination, and Weber's theory of social closure are employed to examine different predictors of immigrant employment success. A distinctive contribution of this study is the examination of how different characteristics of an immigrant's intended occupation may influence the likelihood of him or her obtaining a job match and the rate at which he or she does so. Several significant results are obtained in these analyses. Notably, immigrants who seek high-status occupations have less employment success in Canada than those who seek low-status occupations, suggesting that the difficulties immigrants encounter in the Canadian labour market are in part due to the process of social closure. In addition, immigrants whose levels of education are either lower than or higher than a Bachelor's degree have greater success in obtaining job matches than immigrants with a Bachelor's degree only. Visible minority status is consistently found to be a significant predictor of immigrant employment success, indicating that racial discrimination may be an impediment to this group's integration into the Canadian labour market. The community in which an immigrant lives is also found to have a significant effect on his or her employment success, indicating that immigrants who live in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver have less success than those who live elsewhere in Canada. By examining several different aspects of employment success and accounting for immigrants' employment throughout their first two years in Canada, a more comprehensive picture of the economic integration of recent immigrants is obtained. However, the results indicate that one over-arching theory is not adequate in explaining the process of the economic integration of immigrants in Canada.