Is the Great Reset coming first to immigrants?

Casey Warman and Christopher Worswick have a new and interesting NBER paper on Canadian immigrants.  Apparently even the better-educated ones are not reaping real gains from (supposedly) skill-enhancing technical change:

The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a rising return to non-routine cognitive skills and a greater wage return to university education. Controlling for education, we find a pronounced cross-arrival cohort decline in earnings that coincided with cross-cohort declines in cognitive occupational task requirements and cross-cohort increases in manual occupational task requirements. The immigrant earnings outcomes had only a small effect on overall Canadian earnings inequality.

Immigrants of course are rarely labor market insiders, so, when structural change is occurring, they step into the new world of labor markets before the natives do.  You will find non-gated versions of the paper here.

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