Earnings of Immigrant Classes in the Early 1980s in Canada: A Reexamination

It is widely believed that immigrants admitted on compassionate grounds such as refugees tend to perform poorly compared with immigrants selected for their skills. Recently, Statistics Canada has assembled a longitudinal Immigration Database (IMBD) which provides a unique opportunity to examine whether the above view is correct. Relying on a subsample of male immigrants drawn from IMBD, the present study finds evidence of a rapid convergence in earnings among immigrant classes over time. From a policy perspective, the main conclusion is that age at entry is probably more important than many of the other immigrant attributes reported at landing.