Canadian Emigration to the United States

This paper reviews the historical record of Canadian emigration to the United States and analyses recent changes in the economic incentives for emigration to the U.S., focussing on differences by education. For at least the past 60 years, Canadians living in the United States have been bettereducated than those who remained in Canada. This pattern of selective emigration may have intensified recently. Two factors have contributed to rising economic incentives for emigration by better-educated Canadians: the decline in Canadian average incomes relative to those in the U.S., reflected in the fall of the Canadian dollar; and the sharp rise in relative wages of highly-educated young workers in the U.S.. *Thanks to David Y. Albouy for assistance with Canadian Census data, and to Charles Beach for generous editorial help. The research reported here is part of an ongoing project with Thomas Lemieux: I am extremely grateful for his collaboration and assistance with this paper. This figure is based on data in Zhao, Drew, and Murray (2000, Table 6). The 1850's decade refers to the period from 1851 to 1861. Rates are expressed relative to the population at the beginning of the decade. For example, nearly every Canadian can identify a list of prominent ex patriots living in the U.S.. It is safe to say that interest among Americans is minimal. The situation was brought to light in a 1987 article in Spy Magazine, “The Canadians Among Us.” The low profile of Canadians was attributed to the fact that ...”(t)hey act like us. They talk like us” and to the excessive politeness of Canadians. The first Special Study of the nascent Economic Council of Canada (Parai, 1965) addressed the issue of “brain drain.” Zhao, Drew, and Murray (2000) update Parai, and also frame skilled emigration in the context of overall imbalances of supply and demand for skilled workers in Canada. Canada has always been a country of immigrants and emigrants. Figure 1, for example, shows decadal immigration and emigration rates for Canada from the 1850s to the 1990s. During the second half of the 19 Century, the country actually lost more people than it gained from international migration. Over the 20 Century net migration was positive, but even since 1960 the emigration rate has remained at about one third of the immigration rate. Most of the people leaving Canada go the United States. In 1940, roughly 10 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. – 1 percent of the total U.S. population – were born in Canada. Today, because of the decline in emigration rates from Canada and the rapid rise in inflows from Mexico, Central America, and Asia, Canadians are a proportionally smaller group, accounting for only about 2 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. and less than 0.3 percent of the U.S. population. Flows of Canadians to the U.S. have long been a topic of interest to the Canadian public and Canadian policy makers. Much of the concern among the latter group has focussed on the social cost of losing highly skilled workers to the U.S. – the so-called “brain drain”. From a broader perspective, however, the characteristics of Canadians in the U.S., including their education, earnings, and even the success of their children, provide many insights into the Canadian economy. This paper provides a brief overview of an ongoing research project with Thomas Lemieux that evaluates recent changes in the U.S. and Canadian labour markets, and the contribution of changing labour market incentives for immigration between the two countries. I begin with an