Immigration Policy, National Origin, and Immigrant Skills: A Comparison of Canada and the United States

Abstract

Over 12 million persons migrated to Canada or the United States between 1959 and 1981.Beginning in the mid-1960s, the immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge considerably: the United States stressing family reunification and Canada stressing skills.This paper shows that the point system used by Canada generated, on average, a more skilled immigrant flow than that which entered the United States.This skill gap, however, is mostly attributable to differences in the national origin mix of the immigrant flows admitted by the two countries.In effect, the point system aworksh because it alters the national origin mix of immigrant flows, and not because it generates a more skilled immigrant flow from a given source country.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 167 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.