Author Description

During the 1990s and 2000s, changes in immigration selection policies significantly altered the characteristics of new immigrants to Canada across a number of dimensions, including educational attainment at landing, immigration class, source region, pre-landing Canadian work experience and geographic distribution. These changes were designed primarily to improve immigrant economic outcomes at landing. This paper examines whether immigrant entry earnings improved as a result of these changes in immigration selection and, if so, which characteristics contributed most to the improvement.