Immigration policy and the economic integration of immigrants

Although a great deal of existing research on immigration has had implications for immigration policy, very little of this research has attempted to assess directly the effects of policy on immigrant outcomes. This project uses high-quality individual-level data from European countries, Canada, Australia, and the United States combined with data on immigration policies and labour market structures in those countries to estimate crossed random-effects multilevel models to determine how inter-country variations in immigration policies affect the household income, unemployment, and the receipt of welfare benefits among immigrants. By permitting the inclusion of individual-level characteristics predicting individual levels of the economic integration variables, as well as characteristics of both destination and origin countries, these models assess the effects of a wide variety of broad immigration and settlement policies on the labour market experiences of immigrants, including skill selection, annual quotas, family reunification, and admission of refugees. The main conclusion from the analysis is that many of these policies have the intended effect on immigrant use of destination country welfare benefits, but no important effects on any of the other measures of economic integration.