Immigrant Earnings Disparities: Low and High Wage Employment in Canada, 2006-2023 | WIP Seminar with Laura Lam

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Despite the Canadian government’s reliance on immigration as a strategy to address labour shortages, many immigrants continue to struggle to fully integrate into the labour market.  While a wealth of extant research has explored immigrant-non-immigrant wage disparities both at the mean and across the earnings distribution, relatively less emphasis has been given to the earnings experiences of immigrants within low (high) wage employment.  The present study seeks to address this gap by exploring both the likelihood of being in low wage work as well as the immigrant earnings disparity experienced within high and low wage occupations.  Consistent with theories of labour market segmentation, our results reveal that immigrants, particularly those recently arrived in Canada and/or those coming from Asian source countries, are significantly more likely to be employment in low wage work relative to their observationally similar Canadian-born counterparts.  Among low-wage workers, however, immigrant earnings disparities are statistically significant but markedly smaller than those observed among high wage workers.  The findings of our study point to the fact that, while the over-representation of immigrants in low wage work is concerning, moving immigrants out of low wage employment is not sufficient in and of itself to move them towards earnings parity with Canadian-born workers.  In fact, the roughly six-times larger earnings penalties experienced by immigrants employed in higher wage work point to the need for greater efforts aimed at addressing the ‘glass ceilings’ and ‘sticky floors’ which impede immigrant employment and earnings advancement.

Laura Lam is a PhD student at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto where she holds a SSHRC J.A. Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and she is a 2022-2023 R.F. Harney Graduate Research Fellow. She is a researcher at the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) program in Migration and Integration and her research interest is at the nexus of migration, precarious employment and gender, with a focus on the use of app-based digital labour platforms. She has previously worked in a marketing capacity with various startups and technology accelerators, and currently co-owns an employment-based social enterprise based in Vancouver, The Good Chocolatier.

Our CIRHR Work-In-Progress Seminar series allows members of our community to discuss early-stage research. Future guest speakers include:

• April 2, Alicia Eads, Assistant Professor