The study looked at why the starting salaries of immigrants in Canada have been getting lower over time. They used data from Canadian-born and immigrant men who worked full-time from 1981 to 2001. The results showed that changes in language skills and where immigrants come from only explain a small part of the salary decrease. The decline in the value of work experience gained abroad, especially for immigrants from non-traditional countries, played a bigger role. Overall, two-thirds of the drop in entry earnings for recent immigrants can be explained without considering the job market when they arrived. If not for these changes, immigrants who came to Canada in the late 1990s would have earned much more than those who arrived in the late 1960s.