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Immigration in Canada: A Portrait of the Foreign-born Population, 2006 Census: Higher proportion of recent immigrant in the younger age groups
People tend to migrate while they are young. As a result, the immigrants who arrived in Canada since 2001 were over-represented in the younger age brackets compared with the Canadian-born population.
In 2006, 57.3% of immigrants who came to Canada in the last five years were in the prime-working age group of 25 to 54. In contrast, only 42.3% of the Canadian-born population were in this age group.
Only 4.1% of newcomers were in the older working-age group of 55 to 64. In comparison, slightly more than one in 10 (10.7%) of the Canadian-born were in this pre-retirement age bracket.
Together, recent immigrants to Canada added about 681,900 individuals to the working-age population of 25 to 64. They accounted for 3.9% of the population in this age group.
About 223,200 newcomers were children aged 14 and under. They represented one in five of the recent immigrants to Canada. This proportion is about the same (21%) as the one for Canadian-born children of the same age group.
Another 167,600 newcomers to Canada, or 15.1%, were youth aged 15 to 24. and again, this proportion is similar (14.4%) to the one for Canadian-born youth.
At the other end of the age spectrum, 3.4% of immigrants who came to Canada in the last five years were aged 65 and over. In contrast, 11.5% of the Canadian-born were in this older age group.
