Abstract
Due to Canada’s point system immigration policy, there is a drive to maintain more high-skilled immigrants. A wide variety of research has been conducted evaluating the wage impacts of immigrants on natives. Substitutability and complementarity between immigrants and natives are at the center of previous analysis because of their different wage implications. Rather than making restrictive assumptions on the substitutability between natives and immigrants, this paper builds a theoretical model and estimates the substitutability between natives and immigrants using a pooled time series of Canadian cross-sectional microdata on wage and employment from 1981 to 2001. According to the structural estimation in the paper, Canadian natives and immigrant workers are complements within detailed skill cells, which means the inflow of skilled immigrants increases the wages received by native workers. Natives and immigrants are imperfect substitutes in time and experience cells based on skill. The research also finds that high-skilled and low- skilled labor are imperfect substitutes, which is consistent with previous literature looking at the United States and the United Kingdom.
How to Cite
Brooks, L., (2020) “The Implications of Immigrants on the Wage Structure of Canada”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 33(1).
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