Senior Academic Seminar: Leah P. Boustan (Princeton)

Linguistic assimilation of immigrants and refugees in the historical United States (with Ran Abramitzky, Peter Catron, Dylan Connor, Rob Voigt)

Abstract: The Age of Mass Migration from Europe to the US (1850-1921) was one the largest migration episodes in modern history. We study the English acquisition of immigrants and refugees during this era. We first construct a new database of oral history interviews with 1,200 immigrants who entered the US through Ellis Island between 1900 and 1930. We code detailed information on their pre-migration attributes and their English proficiency, as observed in actual speech patterns. We then link these immigrants to the 1940 population census to observe their educational background and labor market performance. We find that refugee migrants achieved the highest levels of English proficiency, and that English proficiency was in turn associated with higher levels of earnings. Our findings improve on self-reported measures of English proficiency found in the census and are consistent with the idea that refugees have stronger incentives to invest in their human capital in the host country because they are unable to return.