As Sylvie pointed out, we observed—lots of people, lots of researchers have observed—that outcomes for recent immigrants, and immigrants in general, have been deteriorating since the early 1980s. That's in spite of the fact, as I think you probably all know, that the educational attainment of immigrants has risen dramatically. About half of the immigrants who come to Canada now have a university degree. Back in the early 1980s, that was about 17%. So there's been a tremendous rise in educational attainment.
Many more of them are now in the economic class; that is, they're brought in for economic reasons. You'd expect things would improve, given those kinds of changes, but in fact they continue to deteriorate.
People have been asking why. Through the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of it had to do with what economists refer to as “declining returns to foreign experience”. When you enter the labour market, if you have some work experience you expect to be rewarded for that. What we were finding with immigrants was that that used to be the case before 1980, but during the 1990s that totally disappeared. So an immigrant entering with some foreign experience basically receives zero benefit for that. And that was one of the major reasons why we saw this decline in outcomes.
Another one was that labour market entrants, in general, through the 1980s and 1990s, were having a tougher time. For instance, we saw the earnings of young males fall in the labour market. Recent immigrants are, in a sense, just a special case of a new labour market entrant. So they got caught up in this tendency toward poor outcomes for labour market entrants.
That was true in the 1980s and 1990s. Post-2000, we were hoping, frankly, to see some improvement in outcomes for entering immigrants and we didn't see it. There, the reason is quite different. Sylvie has already alluded to the fact that it had a lot to do with technology and engineering.
Through the late 1990s, we started to bring in a lot of engineers and IT workers, information technology workers, in response to the demand for labour. Through the late 1990s, you'll recall the high-tech boom. During that period there was a lot of demand. And then suddenly we were hit with the high-tech downturn, post-2000. Since immigrants were so highly concentrated in these two professions, engineering and IT, they really got hit by that downturn, and it seems as though they haven't recovered. So that's a big part of the story post-2000.
I'll leave it there.