Does higher population matter for labour market? Evidence from rapid migration in Canada

Abstract

Canada has been a host country to migrants for decades through its attractive immigration policy. To enrich the literature, this article analyses the impact of immigration on the Canadian labour market at the regional level. For this purpose, 10 provinces of Canada have been selected for this study with the data spanning over 12 years from 2006 to 2017. Through the empirical analysis, the article finds there is a significant negative impact of immigration on the native employment level. Whereas the opposite results are found on the national level and the impact on the income of native workers is found to be negative and significant. The employed natives are also found to be migrating to other states at a higher rate in regions where immigration is higher. These results show that natives employees in the labour market tend to migrate and immigration hence offsetting the wage effects on the regional level.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• labour market
• population
• regional level
• Canada
• skilled migrants

JEL Classifications:

• C13; J11; J21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LY20G020009).