Statistics Canada revealed that the highest employment rates in Canada are from Africa & Asia.
Note: Landed immigrants are technical terms that Statistics Canada uses to denote a permanent resident of Canada. Individuals with a temporary status & natural-born or naturalized citizen of Canada do not fit into this category.
The study looked at the employment rate of immigrants from numerous regions of the world who were over 15 years of age in Canada. Overall, these newcomer groups had the following employment rates in 2023:
- Africa: 67.7% employment
- Asia: 66.3% employment
- Latin America: 66% employment
- North America: 56.6% employment
- Europe: 56.6% employment
Note that the national average employment rate for this cohort was 62.7%.
These results were also consistent across sexes, with data including just males seeing the same order of provinces as overall immigrants above the age of 15. When correcting for females, Latin America advanced to second place in terms of employment rating, with Asia being third. With this exception, the remaining results for females mirrored the previous two cohorts.
Core Aged Working Population: The Opposite Is True
However, this is not all that the study revealed. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that when correcting results to include only core-aged immigrants, these results/ outcomes were precisely inverted.
Since the highest employment rates in Canada are from Africa & Asia, the following are employment rates for core-aged immigrants by region of nationality in 2023:
- Europe: 88.3% employment
- Latin America: 82.8% employment
- North America: 82.7% employment
- Asia: 81.7% employment
- Africa: 79.8% employment
Note that for this cohort, the national average employment rate was 82.6%. Findings for this group also proved consistent across the sexes. When limiting the dataset to just females, the same order took place in terms of employment rates. When only considering males, North America switched spots with Latin America, ranked second & third respectively.
What Does This Imply?
The inversion that we see in terms of employment rate among newcomers seems to indicate that landed newcomers from Africa & Asia are much more likely to be employed between the ages of 15-25 & above the age of 54 than their counterparts from different areas of the world.
Conversely, newcomers from Europe, Latin America, & North America boasted a higher rate of employment between the ages of 25-54 years of age than immigrant cohorts from other areas of the world, thus suggesting that they are well suited to the labor market between these years.
The difference in employment rates between these two cohorts might be because of cultural differences during school years. The pronounced difference suggests that immigrants from Europe, Latin America, & North America were more likely to focus on just schooling between the ages of 15-25 compared to newcomers from Asia & Africa, who appeared more likely to find employment during their studies. This would explain why some regional cohorts showed lower scores in the ‘15 & over’ group but drastically increased when limiting the data to core-aged workers. However, newcomers of all regions/ provinces witnessed increased employment rates in core-aged years.
More Data Required
As the highest employment rates in Canada are from Africa & Asia, the study offers insights into the working habits of immigrants. Moreover, it might be limited in its scope & availability because of the exclusion of temporary foreign workers & international students from the dataset.
Foreign workers make up a crucial part of Canada’s labor force & contribute to a significant proportion of Canada’s workforce. As of December 2022, there were over 797,225 valid work permit holders in the nation. In fact, within the last ten years, Canada has witnessed a 108% increase in the number of temporary foreign workers, thus illustrating how crucial this portion of the population is to the Canadian labor force.
Similarly, Canada has witnessed a huge increase in its international student population, which will be home to close to a million international students in 2023. Like foreign workers, international students contribute significantly to the workforce, highlighted by Canada’s willingness to extend work hour abilities for this group through to the next year (2024). The inclusion of these two groups in a broader study is integral to witnessing a more representative view of Canada’s labor force.