Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The fast-growing share of foreign-born immigrant children in the US population underscores the urgency of evidence-based research on the determinants and facilitators of assimilation for immigrant students. Previous research establishes that gaining proficiency in the language of the immigrant's destination country yields significant wage premiums. While existing evidence focuses on the effect of fluency on educational attainment and earnings, surprisingly little is known about the effect of language proficiency on human capital accumulation. Specifically, how does English learning potential affect investments in math, reading, and science subjects? We fill this gap by examining the nuanced pathways via which improved English fluency can affect students’ skill specialization, investigating the degree to which immigrants accumulate English-intensive skills relative to non-language intensive skills.

We take advantage of variation in English fluency by age at immigration, country of origin, and linguistic distance and employ a difference-in-difference empirical strategy to identify the role of English learning potential on skill accumulation. We use high-quality longitudinal data for our analyses, including Add Health and North Carolina administrative data, that contain detailed educational variables on standardized test scores, curriculum selection, and academic expectations. Findings indicate that later-arriving immigrants invest relatively more in math and science subjects than language-intensive ones during high school. These differential skill investments show that immigrant children and adolescents are accumulating skills in a manner consistent with their comparative advantage upon arrival.