Abstract
We examine the role of between- and within-firm mobility in the early-career outcomes of immigrant men. Among Canadian workers with less than 10 years of potential experience, we find that visible minority immigrants were significantly less likely to have been promoted with their initial employers than similar white natives but were just as likely to have moved to new employers over the course of a year between interviews. White immigrants, on the other hand, were just as likely to be promoted as white natives but much more likely to move to new employers—suggesting that they enjoyed more overall mobility than white natives and other immigrants. We present tentative evidence linking these mobility patterns to differences in wage growth and occupational change between immigrants and natives. Overall, our findings suggest that the between- and within-firm mobility of white immigrants may play an important role in their relative economic success in Canada, while adding to growing evidence that visible minority immigrants experience frictions in the labor market that hinder their mobility and thus their economic prospects.JEL Classification: J61, J71
Highlights
Integrating immigrants into the labor market is a key policy objective in countries with large and growing immigrant populations like Canada, which admitted over five million immigrants between 1995 and 2010 (Statistics Canada 2016) and where 20.6% of residents were born abroad (Chui 2013)
While we find that visible minority immigrants who arrived before the shift to an immigration policy focusing on admitting skilled immigrants fare worse in terms of promotion probabilities than those who arrived after this policy change, the difference in promotion probabilities is not statistically significant
In the third and fourth panels, we find that visible minority immigrants are approximately 8 percentage points more likely to remain with the initial employer without being promoted and 6 percentage points more likely to move to a new employer between interviews than similar white natives— neither difference is statistically significant
Summary
Integrating immigrants into the labor market is a key policy objective in countries with large and growing immigrant populations like Canada, which admitted over five million immigrants between 1995 and 2010 (Statistics Canada 2016) and where 20.6% of residents were born abroad (Chui 2013).
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