Provincial Nominee Programs: An Evaluation of the Earnings and Retention Rates of Nominees

Provincial Nominee Programs have increased the role of the provinces in selecting economic class immigrants to Canada. Despite the growing importance of the Nominee programs, relatively little is known about the outcomes of immigrants landing through these programs. In this paper, we use administrative data to compare the earnings and retention rates of Nominees with federal economic class immigrants in the first two years after landing. We find that Nominees had substantially higher earnings. However, Manitoba was the only province where Nominees were more likely to stay in the nominating province than observationally equivalent federal economic class immigrants.