Immigrants, temporary residents and Canada's job growth since 2020: what the Labour Force Survey can and cannot show

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.

1Canada 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.TL;DR The nearest official series is annual, has known undercounts of NPRsTL;DR, and was rebuilt partway through the period in question: In January 2025, StatsCan revised the LFS series back to 2021 with new population control totalsDetails. 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.

2What 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.Details The decade before tells the same story: In the 2010s, immigrant workers accounted for 84% of the growth in the total labour forceDetails. Assembled through the pandemic period the picture is steeper still — of the +1.7 millionDetails net jobs Canada added between 2019 and 2024, the Canadian-born net employment gain over the same period: roughly zero to +200KDetails.

Laid side by side with the American figures, the research's best assembly looks like this:

The split inside the Canadian gain is roughly even between the two foreign-born groups. Permanent-resident immigrant employment rose by roughly +800K to +900KKey findings, and temporary residents' rose by roughly +800K to +1.0MKey findings. 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-bornKey findings.

3Why 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).Key findings 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.Key findings

The result is a workforce unlike its peers. Adding temporary residents, the foreign-born share of employment was approaching ~33% by late 2024Key findings, which is roughly double the US foreign-born employment share (~19%)Key findings. 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).Key findings

4The 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 growthDetails. 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.Details

The revisions make the comparison harder still. Data for immigrant groups were corrected on January 29, 2025Details, which, in the research's words, makes a clean Feb-2020 → 2025 comparison genuinely unstableDetails. And the categories do not line up across the border: StatsCan's "Canadian-born" includes Indigenous people and Canadian-born children of immigrantsCaveats, so direct comparisons with American figures are approximate.

5The 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)Details, and the jobs engine stalled with it: only +27,000 net jobs from Jan–Jul 2025Details. 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%Details. 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)Details.

The reversal shows up in every series. In one quarter alone: Q3 2025 NPR outflows of 339,505 vs. inflows of 163,026Key findings. Unemployment rose to 7.1% in September (highest since 2016 ex-pandemic)Key findings, and long-term unemployment hit its highest share since Feb 1998 (excluding 2020–21)Key findings. 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 inflowsKey findings. 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."Key findings

6What 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)Key findings. The scale of the intake changed abruptly; one study finds annual immigration grew 3.5%/yr (2000–15) then 21.3%/yr (2016–24)Key findings. A bank economist estimated that Canada took in ~1.5 million more newcomers than originally plannedKey findings, and that the system has been driving GDP but suppressing per-capita growthKey findings.

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 CanadaRecommendations, 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.Recommendations

7What 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.