published in: D.A. Cobb-Clark and S. Khoo (eds.), Public Policy and Immigrant Settlement, Edward Elgar 2006
Many countries are placing a greater emphasis on productive skills in the immigrant selection
policies as a way of achieving national objectives regarding immigration. These changes
stem primarily from the belief that skill-based immigrants do better in some sense and
provide greater economic benefits than immigrants admitted on the basis of their family
relationships. This paper takes advantage of a change in Australian selection policy in the
1990s to assess the extent to which selection policy can facilitate employment outcomes for
new arrivals over the medium run. The results indicate that the increased emphasis on
productive skills in the selection process led to striking differences in the human capital
endowments of new immigrants. These improvements in human capital in turn completely
explain the higher participation rates amongst immigrants arriving in Australia at the end of
the 1990s. Moreover, approximately half of the fall in men’s unemployment rates also stems
from increases in productive skills, though the substantial decline in women’s unemployment
rates are driven solely by changes in the returns to skills rather than skill levels themselves.
Overall, these results indicate that there is a large potential for selection policy to influence
immigrant outcomes not just immediately after migration but also in the medium run. At the
same time, it is also clear that income-support policy and the overall state of the Australian
labour market also had a hand in improving the labour market position of new arrivals.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.