A Study of Immigration Performance in Terms of Task Specialization in the Canadian Labor Market

In this dissertation, I study the impact of immigration on the Canadian economy as well as the economic outcomes of immigrants to Canada. I focus on two key economic outcomes, which differ from most of the previous literature: task usage and labor market segmentation. My first chapter examines the effect of immigration on natives' task usage. My second chapter studies differences in the outcomes of immigrants who work in and out of ethnic enclaves. My third chapter explores differences in the outcomes of first, second and third-generation immigrants.

In Chapter 1, I use Canadian confidential census data to undertake research on the effects of immigration on employees' performance in the Canadian labor market. This chapter concentrates on changes in task supplies in the labor market resulting from changes in immigration to Canada. I also find the increase in the foreign-born share will lead both the relative supply of communication versus manual tasks and the relative compensations to go up in the highly-educated workers' group.

In Chapter 2, I study performance differences between immigrants working in the regular Canadian labor market and those in the ethnic enclave sector. I find that the returns to education are greater and being a visible minority carries less of a wage penalty for immigrants working in the regular sector. Moreover, I document different effects of education and race on both earnings and job segments for these two types of immigrants and propose an explanation. Finally, I have a view of the differences in performance between immigrants working in the regular and enclave sectors.

In Chapter 3, I estimate differences in task supply and earnings between natives and two generations of immigrants in 1970 and 2015. Furthermore, using a three-fold Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, I link the average weekly wage of workers to their task productivity and try to find the effects of the returns to tasks as well as different task supplies on the average wage gap between natives and immigrants. Finally, I demonstrate and measure the significant effects of immigrant status on an employee's labor market segment