Immigrants Trail Canadians on Literacy at Every Education Level, Report Finds
Immigrants to Canada have lower literacy scores than Canadians at every educational level, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, a Canadian research group.
The report was written by Parisa Mahboubi, the institute's associate director of research. It finds that immigrants are more likely than other Canadian residents to hold a university degree. Even so, university-educated immigrants have English or French literacy similar to that of Canadians whose highest schooling is a high-school diploma.
The gaps also show up in numeracy, which is the ability to work with numbers, and in adaptive problem-solving, which measures how people handle unfamiliar problems. Immigrants score lower on average than non-immigrants in both areas. The report puts the literacy gap at 20 points, the adaptive problem-solving gap at 16 points and the numeracy gap at 7 points.
Employment tells a different part of the story. Immigrants aged 25 to 65 are employed at about the same rate as non-immigrants. They are more likely to work in high-skill occupations, but they are also more likely to say they are overqualified for their jobs.
The picture is sharper for people whose highest credential was earned outside Canada. According to the report, these immigrants tend to earn less than Canadians with comparable credentials, and they are less likely to work in high-skill jobs. Immigrants with degrees from outside Canada are also more likely to experience overqualification.
The report concludes that immigrant earnings are more closely tied to measured skills, including literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem-solving, than the earnings of non-immigrant residents are.
A separate report from the institute, titled "Harnessing Immigrant Talent: Reducing Overqualification and Strengthening," addresses overqualification directly. Statistics Canada, the national statistical office, publishes much of the official data on education and jobs that researchers use in this area.
