Immigrant Acculturation in a Complex National and International Climate

Gustave Goldmann, Statistics Canada
Jean Renaud, Université de Montréal

How immigrants adapt depends on a number of social, economic and contextual factors. The research presented in this paper focuses on one specific issue – access to first employment. The authors control for factors such as local economic conditions and the individual’s human capital characteristics in investigating the success (or lack thereof) that immigrants have in obtaining their first paid employment upon arriving in Canada. In addition, the authors explore the impact on labor market access of events such as September 11th, 2001 on individuals belonging to specific ethnic groups. The research is conducted on the first wave of data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (n = 12 040). The authors use event history analysis models with the time to access paid employment as the dependent variable.