Task Specialization, Wage, and Immigration in Canada

This paper uses Canadian census data to undertake research on the effects of immigration onemployees’ performance in the Canadian labor market. By generating a new method to definecommunication and manual tasks, this paper concentrates on changes in task supplies in the labormarket resulting from changes in immigration to Canada. This paper also studies the effects ofa change in the foreign-born worker share on task compensations. In this paper, the Canadianlabor market is separated into two groups based on workers’ educational attainments, and thesetwo groups have different reactions to an increase in the share of immigrant workers in the labormarket. Using a regression model, I estimate compensations for communication and manual tasksrespectively to study how relative compensation variation is affected by the foreign-born workershare. I find some important evidence of immigration effects on the Canadian labor market, andthese effects vary across metropolitan areas and years. The increase in the foreign born share willlead both the relative supply of communication versus manual tasks and the relative compensationsof these tasks to go up in the highly-educated workers group. However, the Canadian immigrationdoes not impact the less-educated group quite significantly because of the smaller size of this groupin the labor market