Emigration/return of foreign born professionals

Question

A student is doing a research on the topic of emigration or return migration of foreign-born professionals in Canada, 1990 to 2003 for her graduate research methods course. Is there an appropriate data set to address this topic?

Answer

This data doesn't appear to be available in a DLI product.

Our Demography Division has data on emigration and returning emigrants but not data on emigration or return emigration of foreign born professionals in particular.

Some of the data your graduate student was hoping for might be available as a fee based custom request from the longitudinal administrative data (LAD) file.

Here is what the author division told me about the data that might be available as a fee based custom request:

"Our longitudinal administrative data (LAD) contain variables from the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB). A couple of variables (from IMDB) relate to field of work: Immigrant's Intended Occupation and Immigrant's Industry Codes. On the LAD, we also have NAICS coding to identify primary and secondary industry of employment. This industry information is captured for all individuals for whom we have a T4 record.

By linking to the IMDB, we identify immigrants who arrived to Canada starting in 1980 (landing year). This allows a researcher to then study the incomes and family characteristics of this group of individuals through the years, up to 2005. With the LAD, I believe we can also identify return migrants, although we could not always distinguish foreign-born from Canadian-born unless that individual was already identified as an immigrant through IMDB.

The LAD Data Dictionary (12-585-XIE -
http://www.statcan.ca/bsolc/english/bsolc?catno=12-585-X)
which contains a complete glossary of LAD variables, is always a good starting point. I suggest your client consult the dictionary and examine the different variables that can be used. Once we have more details on the output required, we can further discuss feasibility of project and related costs."