Thank you.
I'm going to talk a bit about the main results from a paper I completed with Ted McDonald, who is an economist at the University of New Brunswick. It was part of a major project done by the Canadian Labour Market and Skills Researcher Network funded by the federal government.
The title of our paper was “Intergenerational Effects of Immigration Policy on the Education Distribution: Apprenticeship Training in Canada”. Our background as labour economists is more in the area of immigration. The approach we took to this particular paper was to ask the question, what have past immigration policy and recent immigration policy done in terms of shaping the attitudes that young, Canadian-born individuals have towards different educational pathways—the skilled trades in general, apprenticeship in particular, versus different types of post-secondary education such as university degrees? There are two main policy changes related to our immigration policy that we wanted to explore.
First was the idea that there have been profound changes in source country in our immigrant intake over the past 40 years, movements away from northern European countries in particular and towards Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We were curious to see, just in a simple way, whether those movements led the children of immigrants, those born in Canada with immigrant fathers in particular, who may or may not have worked in the skilled trades or had an apprenticeship from their home country...whether that was associated with higher or lower probabilities of completing apprenticeships.
The other thing we were interested in looking at was the fact that, as you may well know, in the 1990s there was a big movement towards selecting immigrants based on university education, primarily, a big increase in educational requirements in general. We were curious to see whether there was really sort of an intergenerational echo, or intergenerational relationships, between the educational outcomes of the immigrants coming in and the educational choices and outcomes of their children.
In a nutshell, we find pretty strong evidence that these two changes in immigration are likely to have and are having effects on the next generation in terms of their attitudes towards working in the skilled trades in general and entering and completing an apprenticeship program in particular. The analysis is based on the master file, the confidential files of the 2006 Canadian census, where, for the first time, there was a specific question asked related to apprenticeship completion. We were able to look at the average characteristics of that variable—completing an apprenticeship—for immigrants themselves, those who arrived here as adults and those who arrived as children, and we also have detailed information on the place of birth of the parents. We focused on the father—trying to get relationships between young men and young women doing apprenticeships based on whether their fathers had done apprenticeships in the previous generation.
So in a nutshell, we do see big differences. For example, just in general, immigrant men are 11% more likely to have a higher university degree than either second-generation men, which are those with an immigrant parent, at 6%, or third-generation men, those with a Canadian-born parent, at 4%. We see big differences by source country. Even when we focus on Canadian-born men and women separately, we find that the source country of their immigrant parents, if they have an immigrant parent, matters. So first-generation Canadian-born men with a parent, with a father, born in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand have relatively high rates of apprenticeship credentials in Canada. These are again the Canadian-born outcomes.
In contrast, for Canadian-born men whose fathers were born in Asia in general, different regions of Asia, we see very low rates of completion of apprenticeship and much higher rates of going to university.
We're not saying this is a bad thing, by any stretch; higher educational attainment is a good thing. But it has implications, if we're planning ahead and trying to ensure that we have individuals who are going to take up employment in the skilled trades. If our immigration policy is pushing both the immigrants themselves towards university education and, through intergenerational mechanisms, pushing their children towards university education, then we see that as a challenge for public policy. Mainly, our paper is identifying the magnitude of those effects.
Maybe I'll stop here.