HRSDC-IC-SSHRC Skills Research Initiative

Working Paper Series

Migration, Human Capital and Skill Redistribution Across Canadian Provinces
by Serge Coulombe and Jean-François Tremblay.

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Abstract

We provide provincial and national perspectives on the skill intensity and schooling of the international immigrant (foreign-born), interprovincial migrant, and Canadian-born populations using data constructed from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS). On average, international immigrants to Canada have more years of schooling but a lower skill level than the Canadian-born population. Evaluated at the mean years of schooling, the measured skill deficiency of the foreign-born population (the skill-schooling gap) corresponds to 3 years of formal education in Canada. The skill-schooling gap decreases to 2.1 years of schooling in the case of international immigrants with English or French as first language. There is no skills-schooling gap for the second-generation immigrant population in Canada. These results suggest that the quality of education, in terms of skills acquired, received by international immigrants to Canada in their home country is typically lower than in Canada. Interprovincial migrants typically have a higher skill intensity than the Canadian-born non-migrant population. Overall, the two migration channels have opposite effects on skill disparities across the 10 Canadian provinces. International immigration tends to reduce provincial disparities whereas interprovincial migration tends to increase them. However, the net effect of the two channels on provincial disparities is clearly negative since in absolute value, the alleviating effect of international migration is more than twice as great as the effect of interprovincial migration.