Ather H. Akbari

Immigration Policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States: An Overview of Recent Trends

Immigration policies in most host nations of the west have undergone significant changes in recent years. Based on the four country-specific papers that appear in this section of the journal, and also on our own research, we present an overview of these changes and their context. In all countries, economic considerations play a central role in shaping immigration policy and greater importance is given to scientific research. Several common policy changes are noted in Australia, Canada and New Zealand which include: a shift away from a human capital focus toward more targeted selection based on labor market demand for specific skills, increased emphasis on temporary foreign worker programs, attraction of international students, an overhauling of the refugee system, and regionalization of immigration. In the U.S., while adoption of some of these changes has often surfaced in public policy and academic discussions, legalization of unauthorized migrants remains an important policy debate, with recent arguments focusing on the economic benefits of legalization.

Effects of immigration on house prices in Canada

From the turn of the present century until late 2008, house prices in some developed countries, including Canada, rose sharply compared to the increases in their per capita incomes. Some in the public circles of these countries argue that immigration fueled this rise. Each year, Canada admits about 225 000 immigrants, but information on the effect of immigration on house prices in this country is lacking. Our extensive econometric analysis based on panel data at census division levels obtained from the 1996, 2001 and 2006 population censuses indicates a statistically significant but small effect of immigration on prices of privately owned dwellings in Canada. An out migration of the native born from the areas where new immigrants settle, or an increased supply of housing due to expectations of higher demand in those areas may have caused this result.

Immigrant quality in Canada : More direct evidence of human capital content, 1956-1994

This article provides direct evidence about educational attainments of new arrivals in Canada over the period 1956 to 1994. This evidence is based on immigrants’ educational attainment data obtained from two sources: different population censuses from 1961 to 1986, including those from 1961, 1971, 1981 and 1986; and landing documents of immigrants. Data from these two sources allow an analysis of educational attainment trends over a longer period than that conducted in some other studies and in more depth. Finally, immigrant data are also compared with the educational attainment of the Canadian-born population in corresponding periods. Individuals aged 25 years or older are considered. Results show that, in the total immigrant inflows of any subperiod since 1956, the percentages of those with high school education or less have been declining and have been lower than those for the Canadian-born population, while the percentages of those with university degrees have been rising and have been higher than those for the Canadian-born population. These results contradict the generally held view in Canada that in the post-1967 period, the immigration policys increased focus on family and refugee classes has resulted in the admission of immigrants who are less educated than those who arrived before 1967. This result indicates that other factors such as discrimination and general economic conditions in the country should be investigated in depth to explain the recently cited decline in the economic performance of Canadian immigrants.

Are the educational credentials of immigrant and native-born workers perfect substitutes in Canadian labour markets? A production function analysis

For the past two decades, most immigrants who arrived in the advanced nations of the western world originated in less advanced countries of the third world. One of the main barriers to their economic integration, as viewed in the public circles of host nations, is the lack of recognition of their educational credentials based on which the suitability of using education as a signal of labour market success of immigrants can be questioned. Canada is a major immigrant-receiving country whose reliance on immigration to meet shortages of skilled labour has increased, especially in its smaller provinces and rural areas. Using a production function approach, this study explores the degree of substitutability of educational credentials of immigrant and native-born labour. It analyses customized data, based on 2001 Canadian census, for 256 census divisions. While immigrant workers in all educational groups are imperfect substitutes for native-born, those with a university degree are the weakest substitutes. However, the value of elasticity of substitution between immigrant and native-born workers is high in all cases, indicating that immigrants are easy to absorb in Canadian labour force regardless of their educational attainment.

The Canadian earnings functions under test

Many Canadian studies continue to use Mincers basic post-schooling earnings function to analyse labour market earnings of individuals. Several policy recommendations are based on these analyses. The underlying assumptions in these studies are that the Mincers specification of earnings model is correct and that the error terms of these models are normally distributed and homoscedastic. By performing several tests on four cross-sectional Canadian data sets ranging from 1981 to 1991, the present study confirms previous suggestions in literature that the standard Mincer specification of earnings model should not be adopted without testing. The hypotheses of a correctly specified functional form, and of the normality and homoscedasticity of errors, are rejected for all the data sets used in this study. These results question the validity of past policy recommendations based on Mincer type earnings functions in Canada.

Why Networks Matter and How They Work? The Role of Social Networks in Attracting and Retaining Immigrants in Small Cities

Drawing from over 50 semi-structured interviews performed in three small cities (Charlottetown, Moncton, and St. John’s) and one larger comparator city (Halifax) of the Atlantic Provinces, this chapter addresses social networks from multidisciplinary angles. We see that immigrants hold complex understandings of the meanings of multiculturalism. However, variations emerge relative to perceptions of ‘community’, its value and purpose. While some participants report having strong and positive relationships with kin and other immigrants from their ethno cultural associations, others spoke positively about broader ‘Canadian’ social networks. For younger participants, the idea of maintaining ‘traditions’, for example, through marriage to someone with a common ethno cultural heritage, is a matter of some ambivalence. But variations occur relative to the size of the city and its immigrant populations, as confirmed also by comparisons with a similar sample of respondents from Halifax. However, broadly speaking, universal principles such as honesty and respect are seen as the basis for positive social relations, more so than shared culturally based values. Not surprisingly, the data from this project also reveal notable variation in the types of networks used and, often, how they are deployed based on gender with women’s culturally assigned roles in terms of social reproduction having an impact and, for example, tending to produce ‘broader’ rather than ‘denser’ networks.