The short-term labour market outcomes of blended visa office-referred refugees

In 2013, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) introduced a new refugee resettlement category called the Blended Visa Office-Referred (BVOR) Program. This admission stream combined the core principles of IRCC’s Government-Assisted Refugees (GAR) program and the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program, by sharing the resettlement costs between the government and private sponsors. At present, research that examines the economic outcomes of resettled refugees at the admission category level is limited, with virtually no comprehensive data on the economic outcomes of refugees admitted through the relatively new BVOR stream. This study asks two questions. First, what are the economic outcomes of BVOR refugees who have been admitted to Canada since 2013? Second, how do these outcomes compare with those of other resettled refugees who were admitted through the GAR and Private Sponsorship of Refugees programs during this time? The study found that BVOR refugees reported stronger labour market outcomes than GARs but fell behind privately sponsored refugees in the short term. While differences in sociodemographic characteristics could account for some of these observed outcomes, the findings also indicate that unobserved factors, particularly sponsorship models, may play a role in improved economic outcomes in the short term.