Prior research suggests that despite the increase in educational attainment levels among immigrants, a significant gap remains in their economic outcomes (employment ratios and earnings) compared to non-immigrants with similar attributes. This research also suggests that differences exist in how well internationally-educated immigrants are doing in host countries’ labour markets. A growing body of empirical immigration-based research explains intra-group variations in post-migration labour market outcomes of internationally-educated immigrants by differences in the international transferability of skills acquired via the education system in the source country. Building upon this hypothesis, this study examines from a multivariate perspective, whether and how the location of postsecondary study influences the relative labour market success of immigrant workers in Canada, i.e. their employment status, earnings and education-job match rates, relative to those for the Canadian-born. To proceed, we: (i) take advantage of information on location of highest educational attainment first collected by the Census in 2006; (ii) restrict our population of interest to people between 25 and 65 years of age; (iii) focus on locations of postsecondary study that make up 95 per cent of our target population, i.e. Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, India, China, Pakistan, Poland, France, South Korea, Romania, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Russian Federation, Germany and Iran; and (iv) identify seven mutually-exclusive labour force statuses, i.e. not in the labour force, unemployed, self-employed, undereducated employee, correctly-matched employee, overeducated employee and school attendee. Descriptive statistics by location of study reveal that the majority of our population of interest is overeducated.
Excerpts from paper.
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