Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) Technical Report, 2019
10 Summary
Archived Content
Information identified as archived is provided for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It is not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards and has not been altered or updated since it was archived. Please "contact us" to request a format other than those available.
The IMDB is a dataset combining immigration and tax records created for the purpose of performing socio-economic and mobility analysis on immigrants (with or without pre-admission experience) who landed in Canada in 1952 or thereafter and non-permanent residents since 1980. The IMDB allows for analysis of tax filers and non taxfilers. Readers should keep in mind that the profile of taxfilers can be completely different to that of non-filers. This technical report was produced to give a thorough description of IMDB data quality and recent changes to this database.
With the 2018 IMDB release, the content has expanded with new modules being integrated. These modules include settlement, data on immigrant children, and wages. In addition, the IMDB also includes express entry data, as well as citizenship acquisition since 2005.
As well, there has been a file structure change- the taxfilers and the non-taxfilers have merged. In the past, it was PNRF_YEAR for filers and PNRF_NONFILERS_YEAR for nonfilers; now merged the file is called PNRF_1980_2019.
How to access the IMDB:
As described in Section 6, several products are available to researchers. They can be accessed via the Statistics Canada website by selecting “Immigration and ethnocultural diversity” under ”Subjects” and typing “Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB)” under “Keywords”.
It is to be noted that yearly updates of the IMDB are independent from one another. From year to year, there have been changes to data processing, including updates to the unique person identifier (IMDB_ID).
- Date modified: