Why Do Immigrant Workers in Australia Perform Better than in Canada? By Andrew Clarkeyand Mikal Skut

Authors: Andrew Clarkeyand Mikal Skuterudz

Abstract
Research comparing the labour market performance of recent cohorts of immigrants to Australia
and Canada points to superior employment and earnings outcomes in Australia. Examining
Australian and Canadian Census data between 1986 and 2006, we nd that this performance
advantage is not driven by dierences in broader structural and macroeconomic labour market
conditions aecting all new labour market entrants. Rather, the results from comparing immigrants
from a common source country { either the UK, India, or China { suggest that the
advantage, particularly in earnings, primarily re
ects a dierence in the source country distribution
of Australian immigrants. Moreover, the recent tightening of Australian selection policy,
most notably its use of mandatory pre-migration English-language testing, appears to be having
an eect primarily by further shifting the source country distribution of immigrants away from
non-English-speaking source countries, rather than in identifying higher-quality migrants within
source countries.

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