MADINE VANDERPLAAT, HOWARD RAMOS, AND YOKO YOSHIDA What do Sponsored Parents and Grandparents

Canada increasingly favours immigration policies based on human capital theory and economic out-comes. Consequently, while immigration is on the increase there is a downward trend in the num-ber of “family class ” entrants admitted to the country. The group most seriously affected is sponsored parents and/or grandparents who are also the most vulnerable to criticisms against fam-ily class immigration. The discussion is centered on the perceived lack of potential economic con-tributions of these immigrants. Such a focus, however, overlooks the feminized nature of this type of immigration and the many non-economic contributions these immigrants make. Using multino-mial regression modeling of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada data, we examine economic and non-economic contributions of sponsored parent and/or grandparent immigrants and compare them to immigrants of similar age migrating under other categories of immigration. We find that sponsored parents and/or grandparents make significant economic contributions to Canadian society as well as other non-economic ones that are often overlooked. We also find that their contributions increase over time and are heavily gendered, with female sponsored parents and/or grandparents making more non-economic contributions than their male counterparts o