Predicting Immigrant Employment Sequences in the First Years of Settlement

Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, we analyze factors shaping new immigrants month-by-month employment trajectories over their first 4 years of settlement. We treat trajectories as multidimensional and holistic entities, seeking to predict the correlates of a set of typical pathways identified via optimal matching techniques and cluster analysis. Human capital attributes and household context shapes trajectories in important ways, but patterns related to bias and discrimination are not straightforward and social ties have little impact.