Refugee children’s earnings in adulthood

The Canadian example of Vietnamese and Polish refugees

Vietnam and Poland were major source countries for immigrants and refugees coming to Canada throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, but there are crucial differences in the political and economic contexts that resulted in emigration from the two countries. These contextual differences can produce very different groups of emigrants, including refugees, in terms of their education, wealth, and experiences prior to leaving their country of origin. They also produce different exit experiences.

Vietnamese refugees in this period were part of later waves of emigrants following the Vietnam War, including members of the ethnic Chinese minority group who faced persecution by the Vietnamese government. While many had previously been middle-class or even wealthy, their assets were seized by the government, and open conflict resulted, leaving many dead. Refugees faced extraordinarily stressful exit experiences, including treacherous journeys, long stays in refugee camps, and family separations [6], [8]. The circumstances of their flight from Vietnam are considered an immense collective trauma, with many long-term, serious consequences for refugees’ mental health.

Polish refugees faced some similar trials, including lengthy stays in refugee camps before arriving in Canada [9]. However, unlike Vietnam, Poland had not recently been ravaged by war. Rather, waves of emigration from Poland in the 1980s and 1990s were driven by political repression and dissatisfaction with economic conditions under the country's communist regime [9]. Political refugees were typically highly educated professionals, leaders of the strong, popular Solidarity Movement against the government [9]. Many in Canada were sympathetic to this cause, and Polish immigrants, including refugees, received a high degree of support from the existing Polish-Canadian organizations and Polish communities [10]. Indeed, strong lobbying efforts by Polish-Canadian organizations led to the establishment of East European Self-Exiled Persons as a special admission class. Under the communist bloc, those who left Eastern Europe would face persecution upon their return. Migrants in this class were granted political refugee status without needing to produce any evidence of persecution [10]. This is an example of how the political construction of official refugee status is malleable and not fixed, and the line between refugee and non-refugee immigrants is not always clear in practice.

While Polish-Canadian communities had been established prior to the arrival of Polish refugees in the 1980s, this was not the case with the Vietnamese. Until 1968, immigration policies in Canada selected immigrants based on national origin quotas, where immigrants from non-European countries were highly restricted [10]. Therefore, systemic exclusion of Asian immigrants until the 1970s meant that the context of reception was not quite the same for Vietnamese refugees. Canadian society accepted large numbers of refugees from Vietnam and nearby regions in Southeast Asia, but they did not yet have established co-ethnic communities.

As educated, relatively affluent Europeans with strong social support, Polish refugees were well-situated to integrate into the Canadian labor market. Many Vietnamese immigrants and refugees were also of relatively high social and economic class in their country of origin, but, overall, they experienced significant downward social mobility after arriving in North America. There are several factors that can account for this: in addition to the physical and mental toll of trauma, racialized immigrants face “deskilling,” wherein myriad institutional processes and policies effectively channel them from professional occupations into more precarious forms of employment and menial labor. Thus, on top of many other contextual factors, racialization processes in the resettlement country are highly likely to affect the economic outcomes of immigrants and refugees, regardless of their admission category. These processes create more barriers for children of newcomers from Vietnam than those from Poland.

Earning trajectories of newcomer children in Canada

Although labor market outcomes and earning trajectories for immigrants are well studied, relatively few studies have examined the earnings of refugees [11] and even fewer have focused on the long-term economic outcomes and trajectories of refugee youth, primarily due to lack of available data. However, the recent development of the administrative record linkage projects in Canada has drastically improved the data environment for examining such long-term economic outcomes. The Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), which links the Immigrant Landing File (ILF) with tax records, contains all permanent residents’ detailed information at landing and reported economic activities thereafter. This data set has been used to examine the economic outcomes of adult refugees and other immigrants, but it has also generated findings on the economic outcomes of child and youth newcomers in adulthood.

Using the IMDB and the National Household Survey (2011), one study examines childhood immigrants and refugees (17 years old or younger) who arrived in Canada between 1980 and 2000 and were between 25 and 44 years old in 2011 [4]. The findings indicate that there is substantial variation in education attainments across children of refugees, family immigrants, and economic immigrants. The study reports that 28.7% of children of government assisted refugees (GARs) and 31.7% of children of privately sponsored refugees (PSRs) completed university. These figures are lower than the rates of children of two economic classes of immigrants, skilled worker and business class (49.7% and 58.9%, respectively), but higher than the rate of family class children (21.3%) and children of third-generation Canadians (24.4%). These differences in educational attainment are reflected in the differences in earnings in adulthood. The mean earnings for the GAR and PSR groups were $41,100(CAD) and $43,900(CAD), respectively. Again, these are lower than the estimates for skilled worker and business class groups ($46,400(CAD) and $46,700(CAD), respectively) but higher than the family class group ($39,200)(CAD). The differences across refugee groups and economic immigrants’ children are attributed to the differences in educational attainment and knowledge of official languages of their parents.

Nevertheless, as discussed above, refugees are a highly heterogeneous group, and their outcomes can vary significantly depending on the context of their departure, class origins, and status, and their reception in the resettlement country. Thus, treating refugees as one group versus looking at country-specific groups of refugees separately gives a completely different picture.

Based on the IMDB data, Figure 1 compares the earnings trajectories of refugee and non-refugee immigrant children who arrived in Canada between 1980 and 1994. Here Vietnamese and Polish refugees are presented as one group despite their varying characteristics.

Considering the results for newcomer children from both countries together, the earnings of both GARs and PSRs are comparable to those of family class immigrants, but lower than the earnings of children who accompanied skilled worker immigrant parents. These results echo the findings discussed above. They also indicate that the gap between the skilled worker group and refugee groups widens over time, likely reflecting differences in the occupational choices and opportunities between refugee children and the children of skilled worker immigrants [4].

However, when earnings are estimated separately for the different countries of origin, the disadvantage of refugee children compared to children of skilled worker immigrants no longer holds. Figure 2 shows predicted earnings, adjusted for gender, landing cohort, and age at landing. This provides a clearer picture of the differences in earnings that can be explained by country of origin and admission category.

The predicted earnings for all categories of newcomer children are similar at age 25, yet the differences across refugees and other immigrant groups appear by age 30. For Polish origin groups, by age 35, the mean employment income of the PSR children exceeds that of the children of skilled worker immigrants. By age 40, the mean earnings of the GAR children are also higher than those of the children of skilled worker immigrants. These trends are quite different from previous observations. On the other hand, for Vietnamese origin groups, earnings of refugee children are lower than that of skilled worker immigrant children. Thus, while the effect of refugee status on Vietnamese immigrants aligns with trends found in previous research, it is clear from the results of the Polish origin groups that factors associated with country of origin matter a great deal. Furthermore, the adjusted earnings are remarkably stratified by country of origin. All groups of Polish origin generate higher earnings than any group of Vietnamese origin, including the children of skilled worker immigrants.

These results point to the importance of factors relating to the different countries of origin in employment earnings trajectories throughout adulthood. These factors may include families’ socioeconomic status, migration experiences, or immigrants’ reception, racialization, and the amount of support received upon arrival in the resettlement country. While admission category makes a difference in the specific needs of newcomers during the initial period of resettlement, it is not always those admitted with refugee status who face the most precarious conditions. The effects of admission category, especially refugee status, on employment outcomes are highly variable and subjected to other more structural factors. They are shaped to a large degree by factors relating to child and youth immigrants’ country of origin.