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Title: Dynamics of the Raw English Fluency Premium for Refugees and Other Immigrants in the U.S.
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2016
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Abstract: Previous work has established that U.S. immigrants earn more if they are fluent in English, but a portion of that premium likely reflects biases because fluency is correlated with unobserved factors like self-selection, ability to job-shop, and legal status. Since those unobserved factors represent potentially important barriers to immigrants' economic assimilation, this paper investigates them by looking for variation in the raw fluency premiums earned by different groups of immigrants. One key distinction is between refugees and other immigrants; while refugees have greater legal access to the labor market, non-refugees benefit from greater ability to self-select into both migration and (pre-migration) fluency, and those relative advantages change during the years after individuals migrate. Empirically, non-refugees initially earn a much larger raw wage premium for fluency (even though the effect of fluency on productivity is likely similar between the groups), suggesting that fluency is more strongly correlated with unobserved skills among non-refugees -- as expected given their greater opportunity to self-select. This gap persists in the first years after immigration, even though English-speaking refugees presumably have greater ability to take advantage of refugees' greater latitude in seeking more suitable employment matches. However, the refugees' premium does eventually grow at around the same time that more of them learn English, likely because more capable refugees are more likely to become fluent. Nevertheless, the gap never vanishes, possibly because the less successful non-refugees return-migrate, while that is not a practical option for most refugees. It thus appears that much of the variation in the fluency premium reflects correlations between fluency and other skills, rather than English-speakers advantage in terms of job search.
Url: https://www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=2982
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Authors: Shaeye, Abdihafit
Publisher: University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration
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