An Analysis of the Underlying Causes of the Poor Performance of Recent Immigrants Using the 2006 Census PUMF and Some Observations on Their Implications for Immigration Policy

This paper examines the poor performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Statistics Canada Census 2006 Public Use Microdata File (PUMF). It presents the data which shows that immigrants from less developed countries are doing much worse than immigrants from industrialized countries. Using regression analysis it shows that key explanatory variable for their poor performance are the location of their education, their visible minority status, their language skills, and the level of GDP in their countries of origin. A profiling of immigrants who have done better than non-immigrant Canadians suggests that the performance of immigrants could be improved by utilizing information from the Census on the characteristics of immigrants who succeed in labour markets to improve the selection criteria and distribution of points used in the current scoring system to chose immigrants.