<P> The three essays in this thesis conduct empirical research on the
economics of immigration using data from the Canadian Censuses. In the first
paper, I analyze the impact of immigration on native-born Canadians' wage
growth by combining an area approach and a skill approach. The estimated
effects of immigration from both a first difference regression and a two-stage
regression are either statistically insignificant or significantly positive. The
results indicate that there is no evidence for a negative impact of the large
immigrant influx during the 1990s on the wage growth of natives. The second
essay examines the impact of residence in an ethnic enclave on male
immigrants' labour force activities. For recent immigrants who arrived in
Canada within ten years, the intensity of enclave residence is found to be
negatively associated with their labour force participation rate, but positively
correlated with their employment probability. However, living in an enclave has
no significant effect on the labour force activity of old immigrants whose
years-since-migration is more than twenty. These findings are robust to probit
and instrumental variable estimations. In the third essay, I examine the returns to
education for first, second and third generation immigrant men. Multivariate
regression results indicate that the third generation with at least postsecondary
education earn more than the equally educated first and second generations.
However, the third generation do not have a wage premium over the second
generation when they have high school education and lower. I explain the
well-educated second generation's difficulty in translating their intellectual
ability into productivity by their ethnic and linguistic distance from the
Canadian mainstream, and by negative city-specific effects. I then suggest that
immigrant assimilation policies that target the well-educated first and second
generations should be designed to promote the acceptance of their human capital
by the Canadian labour market. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/19200 |
| Date | 01 1900 |
| Creators | Tu, Jiong |
| Contributors | Jones, Stephen, Economics |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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