Tag Archives | Age of Mass Migration

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

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

Sociological Science November 3, 2023
10.15195/v10.a27


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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ran Abramitzky: Department of Economics, Stanford University and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: ranabr@stanford.edu

Leah Boustan: Department of Economics, Princeton University and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: lboustan@princeton.edu

Peter Catron: Department of Sociology, University of Washington
E-mail: catron@uw.edu

Dylan Connor: School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University
E-mail: d.c@asu.edu

Rob Voigt: Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University
E-mail: robvoigt@northwestern.edu

Acknowledgements: 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

  • Citation: Abramitzky et al. 2023. “The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century.” Sociological Science 10: 769-805.
  • Received: June 23, 2023
  • Accepted: August 23, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a27


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