Abstract

The literature argues that linguistic enclaves negatively affect immigrants’ language proficiency by reducing their exposure and incentives to learn destination language. This negative association may, however, be spurious, arising due to the self-selection of immigrants into regions with larger enclaves. Exploiting the natural experiment of the German residential policy, this paper analyses the influence of linguistic enclaves on refugees’ language proficiency. We find no evidence that enclaves hamper German language learning among refugees. Our results are robust to various measurements and model specifications. We conclude that the negative relationship reported in previous research is mainly driven by immigrant’s residential sorting.

摘要

文献认为，语言飞地通过减少他们学习目的地语言的机会和动机，对移民的语言能力产生负面影响。然而，这种负相关可能是虚假的，是由于移民自我选择进入具有较大飞地的地区而产生的。本文利用德国居住政策的自然实验，分析语言飞地对难民语言能力的影响。我们没有发现任何证据表明飞地会阻碍难民的德语学习。我们的结果对各种测量和模型规格都是稳健的。我们得出结论，先前研究报告的负相关关系主要是由移民的住宅分类驱动的。