Employment rates among Canada's immigrant population improved in 2007, with an overwhelming number of jobs going to new immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, said a Statistics Canada survey released Tuesday.

Asian immigrants (including those born in the Middle East) aged 25 to 54 had the highest immigrant employment growth rates last year.

The employment rate for Asian immigrants spiked by an estimated 4.9 per cent over the previous year, and mostly from full-time positions, says the report.

The labour market also improved slightly for African-born immigrants in the same core working-age group.

In 2007, their employment rate rose by roughly 2 percentage points. But despite this improvement, the African-born employment rate was still below that of other immigrant workers and Canadian-born workers.

European-born immigrants in the same age demographic experienced only minor employment gains of 0.5 per cent last year.

Across the board, employment among immigrants improved by 2.1 per cent in 2007 -- or 52,000 -- in comparison to Canadian-born employment, which grew by 1.3 per cent.

But the overall gap in employment rates between Canadian-born and immigrant workers continued to widen over the past year. Canadian-born workers were 5.4 percentage points ahead in 2006 and that figure jumped to 5.9 percentage points in 2007.

StatsCan attributes the increasing gap to Canada's newly arriving immigrant population, which saw its growth continue to outpace its employment rate.

In total, immigrant employment reached nearly 2.5 million in 2007 with full-time positions accounting for 90 per cent of those jobs.

Among the provinces, Quebec was home to more than half the growth in employment among core working-age immigrants last year -- 28,000 over 2006.

"Quebec was the only province where the majority of the employment growth came from their core working-age immigrant population in 2007," said StatsCan in the report. 

StatsCan also says nearly all of the employment growth for immigrants in 2007 occurred among established immigrants, or those who had been in this country for 10 years or more.