Restricting temporary foreign labour: evidence on wage effects from Canada’s 2014 policy reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the labour market consequences of restricting access to low-skilled temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in a high-income context. We evaluate the effects of Canada’s 2014 reforms to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which significantly tightened employer access to low-wage TFWs. Using a difference-in-differences framework and nationally representative Labour Force Survey data (2005–2019), we find a statistically significant wage gain of 3–6 percent for domestic workers in occupations heavily reliant on TFWs. These results are robust to a range of checks, including event study analysis, doubly robust estimation, alternative control groups, and validation using Canadian Census data. Subgroup analyses suggest that the wage gains were broadly shared across demographic groups, with only limited variation by language proficiency. While the reforms helped ease downward wage pressure in low-wage segments of the labour market, the findings also underscore the complexities of regulating temporary migration. Overall, the results contribute to broader debates on the governance of migrant labour by demonstrating that tighter restrictions can lead to measurable wage improvements for domestic workers, while potentially generating trade-offs in the form of labour shortages or policy substitution.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".