The Place of Place: Location and Immigrant Economic Well-being in Canada

In recent years, successive cohorts of immigrants to Canada have experienced a striking level of deterioration in their economic well-being. At the same time, more immigrants than ever before are choosing to live in Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver, Canada’s three-first-tier or ‘gateway cities’. This paper uses instrumental variable regression techniques to determine the extent to which gateway city clustering is related to immigrant economic well-being. It identifies whether employment status, earnings, and employment suitability would significantly improve if more immigrants chose to live outside of Canada’s three gateway cities. The results suggest that, for the most part, although immigrants do worse than the native-born in gateway cities, they do experience marginally higher earnings than their non-gateway counterparts. Income and unemployment rates are higher for immigrants in gateway cities than they are for the native-born, but the gateway/non-gateway disparity is minimal. Levels of employment mismatch are substantially higher in gateway cities, compared to both the gateway city native-born population, and non-gateway immigrants. An analysis of the data shows that only marginal improvements to economic well-being would result from an increase in non-gateway immigration, and that there are other factors, like race or skin colour, that seem to be more closely linked to labour market success.

Michael HaanEmail: