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Young women with immigrant parents earn more money than their counterparts who have Canadian-born parents, according to a new study released yesterday by Statistics Canada.
But young men with immigrant parents enjoy no such advantage - in fact, some visible minority men appear to have a significant disadvantage compared to their peers.
"It's largely a good-news story for daughters," says study author Boris Palameta, an investigator for the non-profit research organization that carried out the survey for Statistics Canada.
The study, using data collected in the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, followed 17- to 29-year-olds in the work force during two overlapping six-year periods between 1996 and 2004.
Researchers compared the earnings of young men and women born to immigrant parents in Canada between 1967 and 1982 with the incomes of sons and daughters of Canadian-born parents.
Taking education levels into account, Dr. Palameta found that young women with two immigrant parents earned wages about 15 per cent higher than did young women with Canadian-born parents.
This held true whether or not the women with immigrant parents were members of visible minorities, he said.
But their male siblings don't seem to be faring as well. Young visible-minority men earned roughly 38 per cent less when compared to men with Canadian-born parents.
The study found some evidence suggesting that the earnings of men with one immigrant parent and one Canadian-born parent might be higher.
For these men, being from a visible minority seems to damage them in the labour market, while it doesn't for the women, says Dr. Palameta.
"It has nothing to do with their education; they're very highly educated," he says. "They just don't seem to be getting the same returns to their education."
In standardized testing at age 15, the study notes, second-generation students are doing as well as students whose families have been in Canada for longer.
Language barriers, education abroad and foreign credentials don't explain the income gap for these men, Dr. Palameta says. "They were born in Canada, educated in Canada and presumably all their work experience is in Canada."
Some attribute the lag to discrimination, but others, Dr. Palameta says, argue that if prejudice were the explanation, you'd expect to see the income gap among women as well.
The women's advantage also may not be as marked as it seems. The study found that roughly half of their earning advantage over the women born into Canadian-bred families was due to geographic distribution. Three-quarters of young Canadians with two immigrant parents were concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia, and more than three-quarters lived in large urban centres.
In contrast, half of their counterparts with Canadian-born parents lived in less economically prosperous regions such as Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and about 60 per cent lived in smaller cities, small towns and rural areas.
Another factor in the annual earnings advantage among young women with immigrant parents was that they were less likely to have been married or had children in the period studied, and were therefore still earning their full salaries. "This was a bit surprising to me, that second-generation young women are delaying marriage and having children," he says.
By the end of the study, when the women surveyed were aged 22-34, only one-third of second-generation women had a child, while half of the women whose parents were born in Canada had had children.
"A lot of people see immigrants' fertility rates as higher," he says. "They are, but that stops in the second generation."
Jeffrey Reitz, an immigration expert and professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, cautions against thinking second-generation women are doing particularly well, though.
He says most analyses of minority women show greater gains in earning because these women are compared with a broader group of other women, who still experience lower wages and salaries than men.
But for men, the comparison is with "mainstream men who are the best paid people in the work force - they're the ones monopolizing all the best jobs."
The report is a cause for concern, says Huma Pabani, a spokeswoman for the Maytree Foundation, a private think tank in Toronto dedicated to immigration issues. "It requires further study so we can determine the causes and decide what to do about it."
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Conducting the survey
The Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics covers a sample representingroughly 97 per cent of the Canadian population, excluding those who live in the territories, in institutions, on reserves or in military barracks. Each panel of respondents, approximately 15,000 households and 30,000 adults, is surveyed for six consecutive years.
The survey reached 9,163 people aged between 17 and 29 in the first year of the panel.definitions
First generation, recent immigrants: Born outside Canada, had lived in Canada less than 10 years when the panel began. Most arrived as adolescents. Accounts for 5.5 per cent of the population.
First generation, established immigrants: Born outside Canada, had lived in Canada 10 or more years when the panel began. Most arrived under the age of 12 (although a few arrived older). Accounts for 5.8 per cent of the population.
With files from Canadian Press
Second generation: Born in Canada to two immigrant parents.
Accounts for 10.1 per cent of the population.
The '2.5 generation': Born in Canada to one immigrant parent and one native-born parent. Accounts for 8.4 per cent of the population.
Third generation and higher: Born in Canada to two native-born parents. Account for 64.8 per cent of the population.
Unclassified: The remaining 5.4 per cent of the population was unclassified because either their own place of birth or their parents' place of birth was unknown.
Source: Statistics Canada
