Is There an Immigrant Peer Effect? Classroom Composition and the Academic Performance of Native Chileans

Contreras Gomez, Rafael; Contreras Gomez, Rafael

Since the early 2000s, Chile’s economic and political stability has increasingly made the country an appealing destination for immigrants from Latin American countries. While in 2014 there were slightly over 410,000 immigrants in Chile, by the end of 2018 this figure had almost tripled, reaching 1.25 million people, a figure equivalent to 6% of the country’s total population. The growth in the foreign-born population has sparked important public debates about whether native Chilean students gain or lose from the presence of immigrant peers, a question to which empirical studies have found mixed results in the context of the U.S., Sweden, Denmark and other developed economies.

In this paper, I analyze the relationship between the share of immigrant students in a school and the mathematics and reading test scores of native Chilean students. Using student enrollment data from the Ministry of Education of Chile and academic performance results from SIMCE, the country’s standardized test scores, I create pooled cross-sectional datasets for students in grade 4 and 10 for the years 2017 and 2018. My analysis relies on an OLS regression, as well as controls for students’ socioeconomic status, school type, and other characteristics, to estimate a potential immigrant peer effect. Considering that the majority of immigrant children in Chilean schools come from Latin America, I hypothesize that the concentration of immigrants is likely to be only weakly correlated with the test scores of native Chileans. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first empirical study of this kind using data from Chile or any country in Latin America. As such, this analysis adds an important, relevant, and timely case study to a body of literature that has almost exclusively looked at developed economies in the Global North.

Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

DC Accepted Papers Paper: Is There an Immigrant Peer Effect? Classroom Composition and the Academic Performance of Native Chileans

Navigation