Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Cross-tabulations from the 1996 Census raised preliminary concerns
about economic achievement. In metropolitan Toronto, ethnic Chinese
immigrants appeared as negative outliers in economic performance (Lo and
Wang 2004).
19
While 30 percent of all working-age adults in Toronto, immi-
grant and non-immigrant, were not working, this figure rose to 40 percent
for ethnic Chinese immigrants. The four largest sub-groups, born in China,
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, all registered levels above the metropoli-
tan average of adults not at work, numbers ranging from 32 percent of
Vietnamese to a remarkable 52 percent of Taiwanese adults. Lo and Wang
(2004: 115) find the very high Taiwanese proportion outside the workforce
'puzzling'. Among all Chinese sub-groups, the Taiwanese are the most fully
contained within the BIP, and the substantial lack of economic participa-
tion recorded in the family histories in this chapter points to the role of the
Business Immigration Programme in contributing to this anomalous under-
achievement among Taiwanese-Canadians.
20
Personal income data from
the Census also reveal that in 1996 all overseas-born Chinese were receiv-
ing an average income of $21,200, or 73 percent of the income of all
Torontonians. However, those who had immigrated in the previous five
years shared the general income penalty faced by new Canadians, reporting
only 44 percent of the metropolitan income average. While this modest
achievement represents the under-utilisation of human capital endured by
most recent immigrants, marking the most significant failure of Canada's
immigration policy (Pendakur and Pendakur 1998; Li 2000; Reitz 2001),
further probing suggests more specific factors are also at work.
Micro-data analysis from the 2001 Census revealed continuing weak eco-
nomic performance for recent immigrants to Canada from Hong Kong and
China with wages and salaries 'extraordinarily low' in light of the human
capital of newcomers (Guo and DeVoretz 2006: 290). Unexpectedly, high-
est wages coincided with younger cohorts, 26-30 year-olds from Hong Kong
and the 36-40 year-old age group from China. Thereafter, wages and sala-
ries dropped for recent immigrants in their forties and fifties, decades which
would normally coincide with peak years of earning. This profile is consist-
ent with the differential economic achievements of skilled workers and the
business class in Canada. Higher earnings are attributable to younger immi-
grants who land as independent skilled workers, a class normally more suc-
cessful in the labour market. It is the business class who are typically in their
forties or early fifties upon arrival and whose weaker economic performance
would drag downwards the slope of earnings with increasing age.
The Census also provides a striking contrast between accumulated wealth
and current cash flow among wealthy migrants from East Asia. A special
tabulation of the 1996 Census for Vancouver separated out immigrant
households of self-declared Chinese ethnic origin who had landed in Canada
during the previous decade. In a first run this population was disaggregated
