Employment and education
Employment allows people to afford the basic necessities that are essential for good health. It also provides a sense of identity and purpose, social contacts and opportunities for personal growth (PHAC, 2003). Immigrants and refugees face barriers in accessing employment in Canada, including the recognition of foreign credentials and the lack of Canadian work experience (Salami et al., 2017).
As a whole, immigrants and refugees have lower employment rates and higher unemployment rates compared to the Canadian-born population (Kiziltan, 2016). In addition, there are differences based on immigration class:
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In general, principal applicants in the economic immigrant class have higher participation rates in the labour force, higher employment rates and lower unemployment rates than all other immigrant classes and the Canadian-born population (Ibid.).
This trend also extends to female spouses, where women who arrived as spouses of economic immigrant principal applicants had better labour market outcomes compared to women arriving in the Family Class (Bonikowska & Hou, 2017).
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Immigrants without a university degree or diploma have unemployment rates that are on par or better than the unemployment rates of similarly educated Canadians.
University-educated immigrants at all levels (i.e., long established, recent and very recent) have higher unemployment rates than the Canadian-born, with very recent immigrants facing an unemployment rate that is between 1.5 times to three times higher than similarly educated Canadians (Statistics Canada, 2018a).
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In 2017, the national unemployment rate for recent immigrants was 10.4%, about 1.7 times the rate of Canadian-born individuals. (Statistics Canada, 2018b)
Recent immigrants who had been in Canada for five years or less, represented only 3.6% of the Canadian labour force in 2016 (Statistics Canada, 2017m).
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Refugees seem to have particular difficulty entering the labour market, so much so that their unemployment rates remain higher than other immigrant groups, even after five years in Canada (Wilkinson & Garcea, 2017: 9).
Among resettled refugees, privately sponsored refugees tend to have higher employment rates and earnings than government-assisted refugees (Kaida, Hou, & Stick, 2020).
Impact of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic disruptions on the labour market impacted immigrants more severely than the native-born workers as they were more likely to work jobs that are not easy to perform remotely (Cassidy, 2022). Moreover, both immigrants and the native-born population experienced rapid employment recovery post-pandemic.