Book Description

These changes include the introduction of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which altered the selection criteria for economic immigrants; the expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), which sent more immigrants to nontraditional destinations, mainly in western Canada; and the introduction of new programs such as the Ministerial Instructions, the Canadian Experience Class and the [...] In that context, we assess the direct effect of immigration on changes in the low-income rate, the high-income rate, family income inequality and earnings inequality in Canada between 1995 and 2010, and in particular we examine what factors explain the decline in the low-income rate among recent immigrants over the 2000s. [...] In Manitoba and Saskatchewan - which saw a significant increase in the number of immigrants admitted through the PNP in the 2000s, doubling the share of the population consisting of recent immigrants (although remaining well below the share in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver) - the low-income rate among recent immigrants rapidly declined over the decade (see table 2). [...] But did the decline in the low-income rate among recent immigrants contribute to the fall in the overall Canadian rate during the 2000s, just as it accounted for much of the rise in the 1990s? [...] We decompose the 0.042 change in the index value and find that, although the population share of immigrants who had been in Can- ada for less than 15 years increased from 7.2 percent to 8.2 percent, the difference in income inequality between immigrants and the Canadian-born did not make a major contribution to the increase in aggregate inequality - the increase in the share of immigrants in the p.