The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century

Ran Abramitzky; Leah Boustan; Peter Catron; Dylan Connor; Rob Voigt

doi:10.15195/V10.A27

The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century

Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Peter Catron, Dylan Connor, Rob Voigt

Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	769-805
Number of pages	37
Journal	Sociological Science
Volume	10
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.15195/V10.A27
State	Published - 2023

Funding

We acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Victoria Angelova, Harriet Brookes Gray, Sarah Frick, Myera Rashid, and Noah Simon. Sima Biondi, Alicia Liu, Lori Mitrano, Lorenzo Rosas, Antigone Xenopoulos and Adam Zhang helped to collect variables from the oral history interviews. Jared Grogan, Bailey Palmer and James Reeves coded the interviews for accented speech. Tom Zohar oversaw audio transcription of missing transcripts. We appreciate suggestions from audiences at Universitat Automoma de Barcelona, UC-Berkeley, European Social Science History Association, Harvard, University of Nottingham, Pompeu Fabra, University of Chicago, and University College, London. All data and replication files may be found here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HMMGJ5

Keywords

English-language attainment
age of mass migration
assimilation
refugees

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Social Sciences

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.15195/V10.A27

Cite this

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abstract = "The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country.",

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AU - Catron, Peter

AU - Connor, Dylan

AU - Voigt, Rob

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). This open-access article has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction, in any form, as long as the original author and source have been credited.

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country.

AB - The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country.

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The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

Access to Document

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