7 Educational and economic outcomes for second-generation Canadians: The children of immigrants

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One can assess economic outcomes by focusing on those of second-generation immigrants, rather than those of the entering immigrants themselves. Many immigrants indicate that they come to Canada to provide opportunities for their children and subsequent generations. Using such a timeframe results in much more positive outcomes than those reported in the previous section.

Second-generation Canadians are a significant proportion of the adult population, with about 15% of Canadians having at least one parent born in another country. Analysis based on new information from the 2001 Census suggested that the education attainments and labour market outcomes of second-generation Canadians are no worse, and in many ways better, than those of similar young people whose parents were born in Canada (Aydemir, Chen and Corak 2005). Second-generation Canadians (children of immigrants) are much more likely to have a university degree; their incidence of reliance on government transfer payments and rates of employment and unemployment are no different, and their average earnings are higher than those young adults of Canadian-born parents.

The analysis also focused on a group of young adults whose parents were immigrants and examined the strength of the tie between their earnings from the 2001 Census and the earnings of those immigrants in the 1981 Census who were potentially their fathers. On average, second- generation children of immigrants earn more than their parents did at a similar point in the life cycle. However, there is some correlation between father and son outcomes, suggesting that the son's earnings will likely tend to be lower than those of someone whose father earned more. This correlation is lower than that observed in the United States. That is, there is more intergenerational earnings mobility among immigrants in Canada than in the United States. This is consistent with the findings for the populations as a whole in the two countries. In general, intergenerational earnings mobility is higher in Canada than in the United States. The degree of such mobility among immigrants to Canada is high by international standards. The study found no statistically significant relationship at all between (immigrant) fathers and their daughters. A daughter's earnings (as an adult) are independent of whether the immigrant father had high or low earnings.

Overall, relative earnings advantages and disadvantages among the first generation of immigrants to Canada are only weakly passed on to the second generation, suggesting that in the past there had been a rapid integration of the children of immigrants into the mainstream of the Canadian labour market. Overall, the children of immigrants, when they are young adults, have outcomes that are comparable to or better than those of the children of the Canadian born at similar ages. This is to a considerable extent because of the very high level of educational attainment achieved by children of immigrants to Canada.

But it should be stressed that, by the very nature of the analysis, these results refer to a group of young Canadians whose parents came to Canada before 1980, and who came of age in the context of the education system of the 1980s and the labour market of the 1990s. Hence, the research, by necessity, focused on the children of immigrants who entered Canada prior to the significant economic deterioration discussed in the previous section. The extent to which these patterns will continue to hold into the future is unknown.¹⁰

 

¹⁰ However, more recent immigrant cohorts are very highly educated, and we know that education levels of children are determined to a considerable extent by the education of the parents. It is likely, therefore, that the educational attainment of second-generation Canadians will remain high in the future. We can hope that such educational qualifications, if achieved, will be converted into continued successful economic outcomes for second-generation Canadians.