Wage of Immigrants in the Canadian Labour Market

This paper uses 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 PUMF Canadian census data to evaluate how long it might take to the earnings of new immigrant’s men to catch up the earnings of their comparable Canadian-born men, based on the log-earning model from David E. Bloom, Gilles Grenier, and Morley Gunderson (“The changing Labour Market Position of Canadian Immigrants”, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Vol. 28, No. 4b, 987-1005, 1995) when controlling for region effects. The results suggest that the estimate of years to equality and their respective confidence interval are roughly higher in the Bloom et al. (1995) model than the new ones which included region variables; after controlling for entry, assimilation and cohort effects. It will take in average forty-four years to the earnings of new immigrant’s men to catch up the earnings of their comparable Canadian-born, after controlling for cohort effects in the pooled sample data. The estimate and confidence interval of years to equality are also given for different regions across sectional and pooled data. The results suggest a large variation and differences of these estimates across regions and different cohorts