The Immigration Effect on Employment

The immigration effect on employment

Canadian has experienced a massive flow of immigrants in the last 100 year (Islam, 2007). The increasing immigrants cause the increase of labour force. Some Canadian view that immigrants are responsible for unemployment (Islam, 2007). However, immigration does not lead to high unemployment because immigration would provide new working opportunities and boost consumption and high unemployment would lead to less immigration.

According to Asadul Islam, “In a general equilibrium framework, immigrants create jobs through the purchase of goods and services independently of their participation in the labour market” (Islam, 2007). Immigration would provide more working opportunities that will lower the unemployment rate because Canadian immigration policies work on a point basis and favour immigrants with skills (Islam, 2007). The policies would lead the high-skilled workers come to Canada. Although the low-skilled immigration creates the unemployment rate (Kemnitz, 2003), other immigrants will make their contributions to promote the economy. Those high-skilled immigrants may be competitors to the local people and would take over part of opportunities for work because they may occupy better skills than most of Canadian employees. But they also will create more working opportunities by founding companies or providing advanced technology. Just as Kemnitz says: “ High-skilled individuals and pensioners gain, while the low-skilled lose”  (Kemnitz, 2003). The relationship between immigrants and unemployment cannot be defined either only in the position of low-skilled workers or in the position of high-skilled workers. The immigration effect is a combination of both sides. On one hand, the low-skilled immigrants would decrease the local low-skilled workers’ employment rate. And on the other hand, the high-skilled immigrants would provide more working opportunities, capital and technology, which will contribute to the employment rate. Since Canadian immigration policies prefer the people who are high skilled (Kemnitz, 2007), the percentage of high-skilled immigrants may be bigger than the low-skilled immigrants. The positive effect come from the high-skilled immigrants may be more influential than the negative effect caused by the low-skilled immigrants.

Also, immigration promotes competition and let employees more skilled. Since part of the low-skilled working opportunities will be taken by the immigrants because part of immigrants are more hardworking due to their willing to have better life. Then, the low-skilled natives have to find other way to find jobs. One way to make them skillful is that they have to master technology. Employers are more willing to employ the employees who grasp the better technology according to the principle of economics (Parkin&Bade, 2010). And competition would promote the development of technology and worker’s motivation for their work. Producers would try to find out the new technology to find the better way of producing goods and services (Parkin & Bade, 2010) to make them more competitive.  But the illegal immigration may be a problem to the immigrants receiving country. According to Palivos, the illegal immigration would lead to job competition between domestic unskilled workers and immigrants (Palivos, 2009). While the illegal immigration are still a small part of the whole population of immigrants, most of immigration effects are sill positive to the economy, which will stimulate the increase of the working opportunities.

According to the Canadian immigration policies, immigrants have to pay the application fee when they are applying for the immigration in other countries. This shows that most of immigrants from other countries have to occupy enough money to afford the application fee. The increase number of immigration would contribute         to the boost of consumption pushing forward Canadian economy because the new immigrants have to buy articles for daily life. Also the student immigrants who apply for the immigration when they are graduated in Canada would bring activation to Canadian economy because they’ve learned the new technology.  When Canadian economy has been pushing forward, employers would like to hire more workers to produce more products, and this will directly reduce the unemployment rate. Also the boost of consumption would encourage sellers  to produce more popular products which will also increase the number of working opportunities.

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