Policies, Potentials, and Pitfalls: the Impact of Economic Admission Categories on Recent Immigrant Earnings Disparities

We investigate the immigrant-native-born earnings gap by economic immigration sub-categories. We are interested in whether two-step immigration streams, such as the Canadian Experience Class (CEC), reduce or eliminate the immigrant earnings gap. We find that immigrants arriving under the CEC have higher raw mean earnings than native-born workers. However, after conditioning on observable characteristics, adjusted earnings’ advantages for CEC entrants remain only at the bottom 10th percentile of the earnings distribution. Our findings show modest earnings benefits for immigrants entering through two-step programs, but these benefits do not fully mitigate other competing signals of foreignness that are negatively associated with earnings.