Immigrants in Canada Facing Poverty

There was an interesting article in today’s Globe and Mail, “The New Face of Poverty.” The article – based on a Statistics Canada study of immigrant incomes – detailed the large number of immigrants to Canada who end up on low incomes.

It seems that, in their first year in Canada, immigrants were 3.2 times more likely to have a low income than people born in Canada were. To be classed as “low-income” a family of four needed to have an annual income of $26,800 or less.

Looking at immigrants who had been in Canada for a number of years, the report said:

“Among those who arrived in 2000, 52 percent of those in chronic low income were skilled economic immigrants. About 41 percent had university degrees.” (To suffer chronic low income, an annual income of $26,800 or less had to be maintained for at least four years in a five-year period.)

Statistics Canada said in a statement that, “the face of poverty in Canada is no longer that of a single mother on welfare”.

“The shift to more educated and skilled class immigrants has changed the face of the chronically poor.”

Looking at the detail of the report, it appears that British immigrants are doing better than the overall picture painted by the Globe and Mail. When the statisticians compared incomes of migrants from different countries, they found that chronic low incomes are not common among immigrants arriving in Canada from the USA and Europe.

Immigrants from Africa and East Asia were 3 to 4 times more likely to suffer low incomes than people arriving from the USA and Europe were. Immigrants from Asia had the highest share of immigrants suffering chronic low incomes.