1Immigration and Canada’s Wage Structure in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In an earlier paper, (Green and Green (2007)), we presented evidence using Census data on movements in the Canadian wage structure between 1911 and 1941. That evidence pointed to a substantial widening in the Canadian wage structure in the early twentieth century. More specifically, between 1911 and 1921 real wages fell at both the top and bottom ends of the wage distribution while in the following decade the wages at the bottom stayed relatively constant while the wages at the top end increased dramatically. Finally, during the 1930s, the spread of the wage distribution remained relatively constant. This broadening of the distribution is in striking contrast to the description of substantial compression in the US wage distribution over this same period presented in Goldin and Katz(2001). In particular, the two countries had substantially different experiences in terms of movements in their wage structure in the 1920s, with dispersion expanding substantially for Canada but not for the US. Understanding what forces drove these very different wage trends is potentially useful as an input into a better understanding of differences in technological choices in the two countries and, thus, of the different paths of economic growth in each. We argue in our earlier paper that the difference in immigration experiences betwee