--- title: "Immigrants, temporary residents and Canada's job growth since 2020: what the Labour Force Survey can and cannot show" kind: "Article" topic: "Canadian economy & policy" date: "2026-10-10" url: "https://canopticon.com/articles/immigrants-temporary-residents-and-canadas-job-growth-since-2020" author: "Chris Telford" license: "CC BY 4.0" --- In the United States a single government table settles the argument about who got the jobs: the labour survey publishes foreign-born and native-born employment every month, and anyone can read the split. Canada argues about the same question constantly and has no such table. ## Canada has no monthly table to point at The American figure that circulates — 9 of 10 new jobs since early 2020 going to foreign-born workers — comes from one published series. Nothing equivalent is published here: No Canadian researcher has published a single, widely-cited number directly analogous to the US BLS CPS Table A-7 "9 of 10 jobs went to foreign-born workers" stat. The nearest official series is annual, has known undercounts of NPRs, and was rebuilt partway through the period in question: In January 2025, StatsCan revised the LFS series back to 2021 with new population control totals. So every Canadian version of the claim is assembled by hand from an annual table, a permit database and a set of bank-economist adjustments. ## What the official numbers do say The one official sentence that comes close is a census release: from 2016 to 2021, immigration contributed to 79.9% of the growth in Canada's labour force. The decade before tells the same story: In the 2010s, immigrant workers accounted for 84% of the growth in the total labour force. Assembled through the pandemic period the picture is steeper still — of the +1.7 million net jobs Canada added between 2019 and 2024, the Canadian-born net employment gain over the same period: roughly zero to +200K. Laid side by side with the American figures, the research's best assembly looks like this: | Metric | Canada (2019/Feb-2020 → 2024) | US comparator (Feb-2020 → 2024/25) | |---|---|---| | Total employment, all workers | ~19.0M → ~20.7M (+~1.7M) | +4.8M | | Canadian-born employment change | roughly flat to modestly up (StatsCan: Canadian-born employment rate fell 2.0 pp from 2016–2021, while immigrant rate rose 2.0 pp) | +471K | | Immigrant (landed) + NPR employment change | majority of the +1.7M gain | +4.3M | | Foreign-born share of net new jobs | ~90%+ (≈ all of net growth, on most plausible decompositions) | ~90% | | Foreign-born share of total employed labour force | ~27% (2016) → ~29% (2023) → higher in 2024 once NPRs included | rose from ~17% to ~19% | *Copied from the research’s side-by-side. The Canadian column is assembled from annual tables and adjustments, not one series.[Key findings](doc:canadian-equivalent-9-10-jobs-foreign-born-claim-statscan-based-reality)* The split inside the Canadian gain is roughly even between the two foreign-born groups. Permanent-resident immigrant employment rose by roughly +800K to +900K, and temporary residents' rose by roughly +800K to +1.0M. The rate data point the same way: from 2020 to 2022, the core-aged (25–54) employment rate rose 8.1 pp among recent immigrants vs. 4.4 pp among Canadian-born. ## Why the Canadian share is higher than the American one Canada's version of the statistic is more lopsided than the American one, and for reasons that have little to do with hiring. The native-born workforce is barely growing: Canada's working-age Canadian-born population is barely growing (fertility 1.25, retirements accelerating). And the temporary population grew faster than any comparable group anywhere: The NPR (non-permanent resident) population exploded from ~1.0M in 2019 to ~3.0M in Q3 2024 — roughly tripling. The result is a workforce unlike its peers. Adding temporary residents, the foreign-born share of employment was approaching ~33% by late 2024, which is roughly double the US foreign-born employment share (~19%). The research adds a comparison that cuts against a common assumption: highly-educated immigrants in Canada have a 9.5% lower employment rate than native-born Canadians, the inverse of the US (where immigrants do better than native-born). ## The uncertainty runs in one direction A number built from several sources usually invites the caution that it might be overstated. Here the known error runs the other way. The survey misses part of the population it is counting — the LFS sample frame misses ~3–4 pp of the NPR population, so even the official immigrant employment numbers understate the true foreign-born contribution to job growth. And some of the apparent Canadian-born gain is a filing artefact: many people counted as "Canadian-born" gainers were not — they were students/TFWs who transitioned to PR status mid-period and reclassified. The revisions make the comparison harder still. Data for immigrant groups were corrected on January 29, 2025, which, in the research's words, makes a clean Feb-2020 → 2025 comparison genuinely unstable. And the categories do not line up across the border: StatsCan's "Canadian-born" includes Indigenous people and Canadian-born children of immigrants, so direct comparisons with American figures are approximate. ## The boom is already running backwards The claim is usually argued as though the trend were still underway. It reversed in 2025. The temporary-resident population fell from 3.149M (Q4 2024) → 2.848M (Q4 2025), and the jobs engine stalled with it: only +27,000 net jobs from Jan–Jul 2025. The cost is landing on the newcomers themselves — Recent-immigrant overqualification jumped to 34.7% in Sept 2025 (+4.2 pp YoY), while it fell among Canadian-born to 18.5%. The central bank reports the gap widening too: the NPR–Canadian-born wage gap doubled from 9.5% (2006–14) to 22.6% (2023–24). The reversal shows up in every series. In one quarter alone: Q3 2025 NPR outflows of 339,505 vs. inflows of 163,026. Unemployment rose to 7.1% in September (highest since 2016 ex-pandemic), and long-term unemployment hit its highest share since Feb 1998 (excluding 2020–21). The late-2025 recovery came from somewhere other than newcomers: driven heavily by health care/social assistance and youth re-entering, not by net immigrant inflows. A bank's outlook for the year ahead names what shrinks the workforce next: "the main sources of labour force contraction in the year ahead are expected to be a net outflow of temporary residents and retiring workers." ## What the official researchers found inside the boom Statistics Canada's own researchers found the boom was good for the immigrants already here: the immigrant–Canadian-born employment-rate gap fell from 13.1 pp (2010) to 6.5 pp (2023). The scale of the intake changed abruptly; one study finds annual immigration grew 3.5%/yr (2000–15) then 21.3%/yr (2016–24). A bank economist estimated that Canada took in ~1.5 million more newcomers than originally planned, and that the system has been driving GDP but suppressing per-capita growth. > **Objection: Canadian-born employment is recovering, so the problem solved itself** > > The late-2025 figures look that way and the research warns against reading them that way: Some of the apparent "Canadian-born resilience" in late-2025 data simply reflects the fact that NPRs were leaving the country (and dropping out of LFS samples), not that Canadian-born were being preferentially hired. A share can rise because your group grew or because the other group left the sample. Without the monthly series, the two are hard to tell apart — which is the whole problem. The research offers the wording it thinks will survive a challenge. Its best single-line version starts from the official figure and adds the temporary residents: virtually 100% of Canada's net post-COVID employment growth from 2020 to 2024 went to people born outside Canada, with a warning against going further: Avoid claiming an exact monthly Feb-2020-to-current decomposition — Canada's data infrastructure does not support it cleanly. ## What this explains It explains why this argument never resolves. Both sides are quoting real figures from an incomplete instrument, and the instrument's gaps are large enough to carry the dispute. It explains why the honest version of the claim has to name its own construction — annual averages, permit data, an acknowledged undercount — rather than being quoted as a government statistic, because no government published it. And it points at something a country that runs the highest foreign-born share of any G7 labour force ought to have: a monthly table, published like the American one, saying plainly who is working. The argument would still be fierce. It would at least be about the same numbers.