Fewer jobs, less income for immigrants in Canada
Canada, 20th December: Newcomers to Canada have lower rates of employment despite having higher education levels than Canadian peers.
Moreover, there is a wide employment gap between immigrants and Canadian-born workers.
This has been revealed by the findings of a latest RBC Economics report titled ‘Immigrant Labor Market Outcomes in Canada: The Benefits of Addressing Wage and Employment Gaps'.
High unemployment, lower incomes for new immigrants—No wonder, immigrants continue to face higher rates of joblessness than their native-born counterparts, the RBC report affirms.
The report further maintains that an increase of nearly $30.7 billion would have been resulted in the incomes of immigrants in Canada if they had been rewarded on same patterns as those of Canadian-born workers.
The study aims to analyze the wide gap in the immigrant labor market.
According to assistant chief economist of RBC, Dawn Desjardins, the figure of $30.7 billion is indeed a big number and it is a clear indicator of huge untapped contributor.
That's because people getting higher incomes do have increased purchasing power. So, they are going to buy increased number of new things including homes, she claimed.
Successful integration of immigrants-still a far cry in Canada--There is no denying the fact that Canada has been successful in attracting increased number of immigrants possessing talents and qualifications, but in terms of successful integration of newcomers in Canada, the nation still needs to do much more, the report clarifies.
That's because the average income of recent immigrants in Canada comes to nearly $28,700. However, if immigrants with full-time employment were offered equal pay as offered to Canada-born counterparts, their average salary would have been around $57,000 in the year 2006.
This clearly shows that the actual pay of immigrants was almost 21 percent less than what it should actually have been. And the wage gap for recent immigrants in Canada is even higher with $37,200 per employed person (or 56 percent).
All this brings us to the conclusion that since, immigrants comprise more than 20 percent of total population of Canada, hence, the nation needs to ponder over the issue of underutilized skilled labor, Desjardins clarified. Small steps in immigrant outcomes will have a significant positive contribution to the nation's economy, he stated.