L’immigration à la rescousse des finances publiques du Québec ?

For many years, successive governments in Québec have sought, through various means, to improve the link between immigration and the needs of the labour market. The solutions put forward generally consist of modifying the number of immigrants accepted or the eligibility criteria, while others would focus on integration in order to eliminate certain differences, for example, in terms of employment, between immigrants and the host population. The current government is part of this continuity by presenting in 2019 a bill through which it proposes various measures related to immigration in Québec. The purpose of this study is to quantify the potential effect, in the medium term (until 2040), on the Québec government’s budgetary balance of various scenarios related to immigration. To do this, the SIMUL microsimulation model is used to simulate demographic and public finance impacts. The results show that any change in the number of immigrants admitted to Québec will have very little impact on the budgetary balance by 2040. On the other hand, we show that a scenario where immigrants are fully integrated into the labour market has a positive effect of $ 7 billion on public finances (by 2040). More realistic scenarios, where the differences in employment and income between immigrants and the host population are not fully reduced, still having significant effects that help to alleviate the pressures of an aging population.