Immigrant Circulation and Citizenship: Hotel Canada?

Canada has experienced a unique problem as a subset of its immigrants, approximately 10%, leave after ascension to citizenship. In this paper I argue that both the degree of immigrant naturalization and subsequent emigration from Canada is conditioned by economic opportunities and Canadian citizenship policies. A triangular model of movement comprising the concept of an entrepôt destination serves as a basis to argue that immigrants to entrepôt countries are faced with the decision to stay or leave after citizenship ascension. Limited evidence is presented to support the conclusion that recently naturalized Canadian immigrants who leave for a third country (USA) or return home (Hong Kong) experience positive selection and overachieve.emigration, return migration, citizenship

Immigrant circulation and citizenship: hotel Canada?

Canada has experienced a unique problem as a subset of its immigrants, approximately 10%, leave after ascension to citizenship. In this paper I argue that both the degree of immigrant naturalization and subsequent emigration from Canada is conditioned by economic opportunities and Canadian citizenship policies. A triangular model of movement comprising the concept of an entrepôt destination serves as a basis to argue that immigrants to entrepôt countries are faced with the decision to stay or leave after citizenship ascension. Limited evidence is presented to support the conclusion that recently naturalized Canadian immigrants who leave for a third country (USA) or return home (Hong Kong) experience positive selection and overachieve

People Aspects of Technological Change: Immigration Issues, Labor Mobility, the Brain Drain, and R&D--A Canadian Perspective

The Impact of Technological Change in the Canada/U.S. Contex

Profiling at the Canadian border: an economist's viewpoint

Scrutiny at the Canadian border to heighten security and simultaneously reduce type one (false positives) and type two (false negatives) errors involves a substantial use of resources as well as imposing opportunities costs in terms of time and trade diversion. One maligned strategy to minimize these costs at the border has been group or racial profiling. This essay develops a pedigree system for Canadian border security which simultaneously reduces both type I and II errors while avoiding racial or group profiling

A history of Canadian recruitment of highly skilled immigrants: circa 1980 - 2001

This paper identifies the types of immigrants that Canada has recruited to foster modern Canadian economic development and assesses how effective Canada has been in recruiting and retaining these required immigrants in the 21st century. Evidence from both balance of trade and balance of payments exercises indicates that it is difficult to determine if there actually exist positive net inflows of managers and professionals during the 1982-2001 period. The entry of these highly skilled immigrants resulted from a series of distinct labour market policies adopted by Citizenship and Immigration Canada and its predecessor agencies. The paper presents evidence to support that between 1976-1990 a tap on-tap off policy admitted skilled immigrants to Canada only if a labour vacancy was anticipated. However, after 1990 tests reveal that the previous year's economic immigrant admissions determined the contemporary immigrant flows with a 10 month lag. Offsetting this robust admission of economic immigrants in the 1990's was the substantial outflows of previous Canadian immigrants as part of the rising phenomenon of brain circulation. Of particular note is the large number of highly skilled Chinese who have returned to Hong-Kong after 1997. Given this brain circulation and the chronic underutilization of its highly trained immigrants I conclude that Canada's traditional use of immigrants as an engine of growth is very limited in the 21st century and suggest recruitment of foreign graduate students to revitalize the role of immigrants in Canadian development

Scholarship, the Law and Immigration Policy

The legal system has entered the immigration policy framework via class action suits which force immigrant receiving countries to address shortfalls in their immigration and citizenship ascension policies. This paper addresses the role of class action lawsuits in the Canadian context

Immigration Policy : Methods of Economic Assessment

This paper outlines a set of economic criteria to assess an immigrant receiving country?s immigration policy from three perspectives. These three perspectives include the resident population, the immigrant and the sending country viewpoints. An expanded version of Julian Simon?s financial transfer model which includes employment and capital externalities is developed to assess the efficacy of an immigration policy from the resident?s viewpoint. Next, Chiswick?s earnings ?catch-up? model is expanded in an employment dimension to create an assessment criterion for the resident immigrant population. Finally, a comprehensive reverse transfer criterion is outlined to provide an assessment criterion for sending regions. These criteria are then applied to European and North America immigrant receiving countries

FSU Immigrants in Canada: A Case of Positive Triple Selection?

This paper investigates the economic performance of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries in Canada. The contribution of this paper lies in its use of a natural experiment to detect possible differential labour market performances of Soviet immigrants prior to and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In short, the collapse of the former Soviet Union allows an exogenous supply change in the number and type of FSU immigrants potentially destined to enter Canada. For this purpose, Census microlevel data from the 1986, 1991, 1996 and 2001 Canadian Census are utilized to estimate earnings and employment outcomes for pre- and post-FSU immigrants.immigration, integration

Social relations and remittances: Evidence from Canadian micro data

This paper models transfers outside the household for both the Canadian- born and foreign-born Canadian populations in a traditional expenditure framework with an unique composition of goods to illustrate the special motivations to remit by immigrants. We theorise that remittances to persons outside the households represent transfers to maintain social relations with relatives and friends and religious/charitable remittances are expenditures which foster group membership. Using Canadian survey data we estimate transfer functions as part of a larger expenditure system and calculate Engel elasticities for remittances to persons and to charities by both the Canadian and foreign-born populations. We conclude that expenditures to enhance social relations with relatives and friends (i.e. remittances to persons) are a normal good for recent Asian immigrants and a luxury good for all other immigrants and Canadians. Moreover, Asian households are the only ones that remit significantly more of their total expenditures to persons upon arrival, compared to the Canadian reference group, and their remittance behaviour does not converse to that of Canadian-born over time. This latter fact indicates strong cultural differences within the remitting households, most probably due to the fact that Asian households have stronger social ties to their extended family. Finally, with the exception of lower income North American and European immigrant households, all other immigrant groups and Canadians generally consider group membership contributions (i.e. charitable remittances) as a greater necessity than inter-household transfers. --international migration,household behaviour,remittances