This paper revisits the puzzle of immigration policy: standard economic theory predicts that free immigration improves natives' welfare, but (with few historical exceptions) an open door policy is never implemented in practice. What rationalizes the puzzle? We first review the model of...

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...

In international forums the EU calls for freedom of movement for goods, services and capital. Freedom of movement of labour - labour migration in other words - is excluded from this claim, certainly in relation to medium- and low-skilled labour. This paper addresses two questions. Firstly, what...

This paper examines the impact of immigration on labour productivity in Canada. Immigration is a factor that has been largely ignored in the literature on Canadian productivity growth. A simplified growth accounting approach is utilized to estimate the reduction in labour productivity in Canada...

Despite recent interest in regionalization of immigration in host nations, most studies have analyzed immigrants’ economic performance by largely focusing on their overall national performance. A regional analysis is necessary because changing geographic distribution of immigrants can affect...

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...

This paper examines the performance of the children of immigrants (2nd generation immigrants) to Canada using data from the 2006 Census. As the composition of immigration inflows has shifted after 1980 from the traditional European source countries to the Third World, the analysis focuses on the...

This paper examines the performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), which is an administrative database constructed by Statistics Canada by combining an administrative landing file from Citizenship and Immigration...

We analyze a newly available dataset of migration policy decisions reported by governments to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs between 1976 and 2007. We find evidence indicating that most governments have policies aimed at either maintaining the status quo or at...

This paper explores the potential impacts of the rights of migrant workers (“migrant rights”) on the human development of actual and potential migrants, their families, and other people in migrants’ countries of origin. A key feature of the paper is its consideration of how migrant rights...