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Impact of immigration on Canada : crime, wage, and diversity

University of British Columbia

This dissertation studies the impact of immigration on Canada. The first chapter analyzes the heterogeneous impact of immigration on crime rates along the years-since-arrival dimension and finds two robust patterns. First, new immigrants do not have a significant impact on the property crime rate, but with time spent in Canada, a 10% increase in the recent-immigrant share or established-immigrant share decreases the property crime rate by 2% to 3%. Neither underreporting to police nor the dilution of the criminal pool by the addition of law-abiding immigrants can fully explain the size of the estimates, suggesting the existence of a spillover effect. Second, IV estimates are consistently more negative than their OLS counterparts. By not correctly identifying the causal channel, OLS estimation leads to the incorrect conclusion that immigration is associated with higher crime rates. The second chapter discusses the productivity value associated with the diversified workforce brought in by immigrants. Instead of treating immigrants as one homogeneous group conditional on their level of education and experience, this chapter focuses on the composition of immigrants and studies the impact of diversity (by source country) on the wages of native workers. Results show a strong positive impact of diversity among highly-educated immigrants on the wages of less-educated native-born workers. This chapter uses a novel approach to test for different channels of the spillover and finds evidence supporting the presence of a productivity spillover and a general-equilibrium demand spillover. The last chapter assesses the impact of new immigrants who arrived Canada within the past ten years on wages of native workers and more established immigrants. City level labour markets are stratified along occupation lines. Results show that new immigrants do not have an impact on the wages of native workers, but they decrease the wages of the immigrant workers who arrived more than a decade earlier. The negative impact is more prevalent for male immigrant workers than for female immigrant workers. The findings imply that new immigrants and natives are not perfect substitutes, and the competition between new immigrants and established-immigrants is at a higher level.

Text

2014-07-25

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/48500

Economics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/