A Note on Canadian Migration to the United States During the 1980s

Considerable media attention has been recently directed towards the flow of highly talented Canadians to the United States. There are firm theoretical reasons, however, to believe that qualitative differences in migration began in the 1980s, owing to the widening distribution of earnings and increased returns to education in the United States relative to Canada. Either of these could result in qualitative improvements in the migration flow. Furthermore, U.S. immigration policy remained essentially unchanged during the 1980s, thus providing an ideal time period to study this phenomenon. We use a flexible empirical approach to document these changes in immigrant quality using 1980 and 1990 U.S. census data. Our results are mixed regarding the hypothesis of relative improvements in immigrant quality