6. Summary
Our major finding is the concentration of immigrant men in low-wage establishments within Canada’s major cities and regions, is a more important source of immigrant wage differentials than differences in how immigrant men are paid within establishments. Certainly immigrant men are, on average, more educated and have more labour market experience than native-born men doing similar jobs in the same establishments, but once we distinguish human capital obtained abroad from that obtained in Canada, this apparent human capital advantage implies neither a wage advantage or disadvantage. Among immigrant women, on the other hand, there is relatively little evidence of low establishment wage effects. Immigrant women, however, appear to experience relatively large within-establishment wage disadvantages. Interestingly, an important part of this disadvantage is not explained by either lower returns to their human capital or by the types of jobs of immigrant women do, including the occupation and educational requirements of jobs. Finally, when we produce separate results for immigrants from non-traditional source regions, we find strong evidence, for both men and women, of negative sorting across establishments and large unexplained wage gaps within establishments.
These findings raise a number of important questions for future research. First, what are the processes leading to the highly segregated distribution of immigrant workers across Canadian business establishments? In particular, does it primarily reflect the relative search methods of
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immigrants or the recruiting methods of employers? Secondly, why does this sorting appear to result in relative wage disadvantages for immigrant men, but not immigrant women? And to what extent does this difference reflect true wage premiums, as opposed to differing preferences for job attributes or sorting of unobserved ability? Of particular interest here are the roles of ethnic enclaves, social networks and job referrals. Finally, what explains the large unexplained within-establishment wage disadvantages experienced by immigrant men and women from non-traditional source regions, even after allowing for lower returns to human capital from these regions and controlling for detailed job characteristics? In answering these questions, our results emphasize the importance of wherever possible distinguishing the experiences of immigrant men and women, as well as the source countries of immigrants.