A Comparison of the Earnings of Immigrants in Canada, United States, Australia and Germany

The legislation on employment equity is designed to protect the rights of all persons to equitable treatment in employment, but particularly those who belong to groups designated as disadvantaged. This paper tests the hypothesis that immigrants could be defined as such disadvantaged group. It investigates the earnings of immigrants relative to non-immigrants in four countries: Canada, the United States, Australia and Germany. This paper also addresses the question of the effects of gender, marital status, educational attainment, years since migration and country of origin as key explanatory factors on the earnings gap between different groups of immigrants. Although wages are only one aspect of labor market performance, comparisons based on wage rates are widely used to describe the labor-market disadvantages of paid employees in the designated groups. Section II briefly describes immigration policy in the four countries of interest and summarizes previous findings. Section III describes the data and discusses the definitions of the population of interest, the measure of earnings, and the taxonomy of the independent variables. Section IV presents the results in terms of descriptive statistics, Section V contains an analysis of the econometric results, and Section VI concludes the paper by discussion the interpretation one might place on these results. An appendix presents the sensitivity of results to changes in model specification and gives some technical details.