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A Study of Poverty and Working Poverty among Recent Immigrants to Canada
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1. Introduction
The economic and social integration of immigrants is an important objective of Canadian government. A number of studies have endeavoured to determine the extent to which immigrants integrate successfully and to identify the barriers to integration that they face.
Most of these studies focused on immigrants' labour market outcomes in comparison with those of other Canadians with similar characteristics. Results show that recent immigrants encounter more difficulty finding employment than other Canadians do, and experience systematically lower employment rates. They also indicate that recent immigrants who are working tend to earn less than other Canadians. Nonetheless, the findings from these studies show that immigrants generally manage to catch up to and even surpass the performance of native-born Canadians in the labour market after 10 or 15 years of residence (Thompson & Worswick, forthcoming).
More recent studies have pointed to a decline in the labour market outcomes of recent immigrants in the initial years following their arrival in Canada. They have shown that immigrants who arrived in Canada after 1990 tended to perform more poorly in the labour force upon their arrival than their predecessors. Compared with those who arrived in the 70s (Picot & Sweetman, 2005), they also had more difficulty catching up with the performance of non-immigrants.
Various explanations have been offered to explain why recent immigrants who arrived in the 90s have done less well than those who came during the 70s and 80s. These range from changes in the composition of the immigrant population (country of origin, language, and skill level) to decreasing foreign credential recognition and a general decline in the return on post-secondary education in Canada.
The greater difficulties experienced by recent immigrants in labour market integration translate into higher risks of experiencing poverty than other Canadians. The incidence of low income among recent immigrants is much higher than that of native-born Canadians. According to Picot and Hou (2003), this gap became even more pronounced between 1980 and 2000. They demonstrated that "At business cycle peaks, successive entering immigrant cohorts had successively higher low-income rates, even though the educational level of each successive cohort was rising rapidly." (Picot, Hou & Coulombe, 2007).
In recent years, new immigrants have been identified as one the five groups most likely to experience persistent poverty in Canada; the other four groups being lone parents, persons with work-limiting disabilities, Aboriginal persons, and unattached individuals aged 45-64 (Hatfield, 2004).
The poorer labour market outcomes of recent immigrants as well as their greater vulnerability to poverty indicate that the issue of working poverty in Canada has a very legitimate immigration dimension. However, a recent study on Canada's working poor (Fleury and Fortin, 2006) has shown that, while recent immigrants are over-represented among the working poor, in absolute numbers, they make up only a small proportion of that group. This suggests that only part of the phenomenon of poverty among workers in Canada can be explained by difficulties encountered by recent immigrants.
The fact remains that each year recent immigrants are particularly at risk of poverty, regardless of whether or not they work, and that many questions are unanswered with respect to the labour market participation and living conditions of recent immigrants. In this study, data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) are used to get a better sense of the characteristics of the population of immigrants who landed in Canada since the early nineties (also called in this study the "recent immigrants") and who are living in poverty. Particular attention will also be paid to their labour market participation.
This study will specifically seek to answer a number of questions, including:
- Are the determinants of low family income among recent immigrants the same as those identified for the rest of the population?
- Do low-income recent immigrants have characteristics that distinguish them from other low-income Canadians? Are they more likely to be working poor, unemployed poor, or inactive poor persons?
- Are they more or less dependent on government transfers?
- Are their housing conditions particularly disadvantageous?
- Do recent immigrants leave low income more or less quickly than other Canadians?
In sections 2 and 3, the data used (i.e. SLID), the target population (i.e. individuals aged 18 to 64), and the years of observation (i.e. 2004 for cross-sectional analysis and 2002 to 2004 for longitudinal analysis) are presented. Section 3 also discusses the way recent immigrants are defined in this study. Section 4 provides information on the sociodemographic, labour market and income characteristics of recent immigrants, and compares those characteristics with those of earlier immigrants and native-born Canadians. Prevalence of low income among these three groups is then compared in section 5. Section 6 identifies the factors that increase the probability of living in a low income situation for recent immigrants and verifies if these factors differ from those identified for the rest of the population. In section 7, a profile of the population of recent immigrants who actually lives in low income is given. In the next two sections (8 and 9), working and housing conditions of low income recent immigrants are examined. Next, section 10 studies the recent immigrants' population who do not live in a low income situation but who are considered vulnerable to it. Finally, section 11 offers information with respect to the dynamic and persistence of low income for recent immigrants over three consecutive years.
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