Immigration, Labor Force Integration and the Pursuit of Self-Employment

Using correspondence analysis, we look at age-education cohorts of male immigrants who arrived in Canada between 1945 and 1961 and compare them to similar age-education groups of Canadian-born males in order to examine shifts in employment patterns across four census periods. We find that immigrants with low levels of schooling consistently had higher rates of self-employment than similar groups of Canadian-born males, and the longer they stayed in Canada, the more likely they were to become self-employed. We posit that the pursuit of self-employment may be tied to the existence of a segmented labor market, particularly for immigrants with low and moderate levels of schooling.