Immigrant Employment Success in Canada, Part I: Individual and Contextual Causes

An interdisciplinary synthesis of Canadian research on immigrant employment success points toward key research priorities. Four determinants of immigrant employment success are widely recognized as significant: immigration policy and settlement patterns, “entry” and assimilation over time, lower value of immigrant human capital, and origins of immigrants and the possibility of discrimination. Other determinants include labour market niches, social and cultural capital, and institutional contexts. Addressing key research priorities—and distinguishing individual and contextual causes—will require new analytic strategies and sources of data. A companion paper, Part II: Understanding the Decline, applies the framework presented here to research on declining employment success for immigrants.