Immigrant Employment Success in Canada, Part II: Understanding the Decline

Research on the trend toward declining employment success for successive cohorts of immigrants to Canada—despite increases in their levels of education—has identified a number of statistical regularities as having potential explanatory relevance. Particularly for the period since 1980, the statistical regularities appear to be related only partly to changes in the individual characteristics of immigrants; they point also to the significance of contextual factors and changing processes within labour markets. This review illustrates how the search for explanations should probe the impact of broader labour market changes, and a wider range of determinants of immigrants employment success, reviewed in the companion article, Part I: Individual and Contextual Causes.