OTTAWA – The employment gap between newcomers and Canadian-born workers continues to narrow as immigrants make up a growing percentage of the Canadian labour force, says new data from Statistics Canada, reported Canadian Press.
According to a Dec. 24 report from Statistics Canada, the immigrant unemployment level is at its lowest since 2006, when the data first started to be collected.
The unemployment rate for working-aged immigrants in Canada is 6.4 per cent as of 2017. In contrast, the unemployment rate for Canadian-born people was five per cent in the same year.
The research released on Dec. 24 looked at the Canadian immigration labour market data between 2006 and 2017. Specifically the findings are based on data from the monthly Labour Force Survey, focused on landed immigrants aged 25-54, known as the “core working-age.”
It found that in 2017 the core working-age immigrant employment rate rose to 78.9 per cent, the highest it’s been since Canada’s data agency started tracking newcomers’ employment rates.
This is in contrast to the employment rate of Canadian-born people, which was at 84 per cent in 2017.
Overall, immigrants currently make up 26 per cent of the Canadian workforce, with Canadian-born workers making up the other 74 per cent. The number of immigrants in the Canadian labour force has continued to grow, while the share of the labour force made up of Canadian-born workers has decreased.
