The Effects of Language Skills on the Economic Assimilation of Female Immigrants in the United States

Abstract

This paper uses recent data from the American Community Survey between 2010 and 2015 to investigate the effect of language skills on women’s economic assimilation who immigrated to the United States as children. The problem of endogenous language acquisition and measurement error in the language variable is addressed utilizing the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to construct an identifying instrument. Two‐stage‐least‐squares estimates suggest that greater English proficiency has a positive effect on a number of indicators of economic assimilation of adult women including several measures of labor supply and earnings. A range of sensitivity tests are undertaken to check the validity of these results.

Involuntary migration, inequality, and integration: National and subnational influences

“…At the individual level, there are clear links with factors such as educational qualifications, work experience, language abilities, age, gender, and marital status. At the level of groups or collectivities-in terms of average or aggregate human capital characteristics-a number of such factors also are considered in the literature (Aydemir 2014;Dustmann and Fabbri 2003;Silles 2018). Additionally, human capital-such as education and work experience-acquired in the host country, rather than abroad, tends to be more valued in the labour market (Friedberg 2000;Zwysen 2018); indeed, the imperfect transferability of human capital may help to explain wage differentials between immigrants and the host country population (Basilio et al 2017).…”

Je ne parle pas français—So what? The impact of language on skilled German migrant women’s employment in France

“…Among German migrants in France, women made up a share of 59.2 percent in 2011 (OECD, 2015). Extant research has mostly focused on men (Toomet, 2011), unskilled migrants (Chiswick, 1991; Miyar-Busto et al, 2020), and migration from economically poorer countries to richer countries (Haberfeld et al, 2020) or to countries where English is the official language, such as the USA, the UK, and Australia (Antonia Silles, 2018; Dustmann and Fabbri, 2003; Laliberté, 2019). Investigating the impact that language has on skilled migrants moving between two equally developed OECD countries which are however known to be culturally different (e.g.…”