Do Pathways Matter? Linking Early Immigrant Employment Sequences and Later Economic Outcomes: Evidence from Canada

Abstract

Employment mobility is a critical feature of immigrants’ settlement experiences and longer‐term life chances. While current research typically treats mobility as a singular outcome, becoming established in a new labor market is a complex process that can entail multiple transitions in and out of employment and between different types of jobs over time. This article advances understanding of the process of immigrant labor market incorporation by engaging with its potentially multidimensional, cumulative, and path‐dependent aspects. Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, I test the impact of an empirically derived typology of month‐by‐month immigrant employment trajectories on the odds of occupational degradation and on weekly wages. I find that the pathways immigrants take through the labor market in their first four years constitute a distinct and important mechanism shaping later employment outcomes.

Job Mobility as a New Explanation for the Immigrant-Native Wage Gap: A Longitudinal Analysis of the German Labor Market1

“…We thus draw on debates that emphasize the importance of job mobility for migrant integration (Fuller 2014;Fuller/Martin 2012). Voluntary job changes, especially within the first years of employment, should positively influence future earnings, either through an increase in the wage level or through a steeper growth rate.…”

Family reunification – who, when, and how? Family trajectories among migrants in Italy

“…We used sequence analysis, which has been successfully employed to analyse migrant issues such as working trajectories (Kogan 2007;Fuller 2014) and was recently used to study family formation and emigration (Kleinepier, de Valk, and van Gaalen 2015).…”

“…The surveyed families had different lengths of stay in Italy at the time of interview. Thus, as conventionally done (Fuller 2014;Castagnone et al 2015;Kleinepier, de Valk, and van Gaalen 2015), to compare family events among families with the same length of time spent in Italy, we considered as the starting time the date of arrival, measuring the time in months since arrival. We therefore focused on three different observation windows, limiting the analysis to three subgroups of the initial sample: five-year period after arrival with 5,408 families who stayed in Italy for at least five years; ten-year period after arrival with 3,362 families who stayed in Italy for at least ten years; and 15year period after arrival with 1,478 families who stayed in Italy for at least 15 years.…”

Initial employment pathways of immigrants in Germany. Why legal contexts of reception matter – an analysis of life-course data

“…Höhne and Schulze Buschoff, 2015;Kogan, 2007), the initial steps of economic integration have only rarely been the subject of scientific investigation, e.g. with regard to Canada (Fuller, 2014;Fuller and Martin, 2012), Australia (Richardson et al, 2002), the Netherlands (Bakker et al, 2016) as well as to small immigrant groups in Germany (on Jews from the ex-USSR, see Kogan and Weißmann, 2013). Looking only at current cross-sectional data bears the risk of underestimating the challenges which long-settled immigrants have overcome since their arrival or of being too impatient with the seemingly unsatisfactory employment rate of recent newcomers.…”