Labour Market Matters - December 2014

While not speaking either English or French is widely understood to be a serious barrier to employment and gainful remuneration in Canada, a study entitled “The effect of linguistic proximity on the occupational assimilation of immigrant men†(CLSRN Working Paper no. 144) by Alicia Adsera (Princeton University) and Ana Ferrer (University of Calgary) finds that the extent of linguistic proximity – the degree of linguistic similarity between an immigrant’s mother tongue and the destination country’s language – has a significant impact on the evolution of the job-skill content of immigrant jobs over time, and can also have an impact on immigrant wages. The selection and admittance of increasingly well-educated immigrants to Canada since the 1990s, has not led to a large improvement in immigrant earnings as may have been expected given the growth of computerization in the workplace increasing the importance of non-routine cognitive skills. In a study entitled “Technological Change and Declining Immigrant Outcomes, Implications for Income Inequality in Canada†(CLSRN Working Paper no. 145), CLSRN affiliates Casey Warman (Dalhousie University) and Christopher Worswick (Carleton University) find that the marked movement away from traditional immigrant source countries where individuals are more likely to have strong fluency in English (such as Western Europe) and towards non-traditional immigrant source countries where strong levels of English fluency prior to immigration are less likely (such as Asia) may be tied to the lack of improvements in immigrant wage outcomes despite the admittance of increasingly well-educated immigrants.