The Contemporary Labor Market Integration of Vietnamese Refugees in Canada

Abstract

Decades after the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people (1979-1981), we reassess their economic integration, along with that of a second wave (1982-1990). We compare current occupational locations and weekly earnings across the two waves and between the Vietnamese and immigrants born in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and North and West Europe (arriving 1979-1990). Occupational and earnings profiles document that the second Vietnamese wave has done less well than the first. Birthplace differences in demographic characteristics and educational attainments help explain labor market inequalities between the two waves and between the Vietnamese and other groups.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2021.1957190 .

Keywords:

• Canada
• earnings
• economic integration
• International Migration
• occupations
• refugees
• Vietnamese

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Mike Molloy for instigating a lively and highly informative discussion in June 2018 that drew on the expertise of former immigration field officers and senior policy analysts to determine why the percentages of economic admissions for the Vietnamese born rose around 1984 (Supplemental Table 2). The authors thank Lei Chai who in his role as a research assistant redid analysis necessary to correct earlier coding errors. The analysis presented in this paper was conducted at the University of Toronto Research Data Centre which is which is part of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN). The services and activities provided at the Toronto Research Data Centre are made possible by the financial or in-kind support of the SSHRC, the CIHR, the CFI, Statistics Canada, and the University of Toronto. Views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those of the CRDCN or its partners.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported in part by funding to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through a Partnership Grant (#895-2017-1009) awarded to the Child and Youth Refugee Research Coalition (CYRRC), headquartered at Dalhousie University.