Legislate Learning English?
New
York Times
June
22, 2006
Economic Scene
By AUSTAN
GOOLSBEE
If Only It Were So Easy
PRESIDENT BUSH'S
plan to give longstanding illegal immigrants a path to citizenship
would require them to learn English as a sign that they accept
American culture. The conservative base of the
Republican Party considers any policy that
would open that path as little more than amnesty, and they consider
the English requirement trivial.
In the midst of
this dispute, evidence from economics suggests that for a large
share of today's immigrants, this path would not be nearly as easy
as either side might think. Immigrants already have a strong
incentive to learn English: better English means a better job and a
higher income. Not speaking English largely means being trapped in a
low-paying job with no obvious means of advancement. Yet millions
still do not know English. Why not?
As Hoyt Bleakley,
an economist at the
University of Chicago Graduate School of
Business, puts it: "For someone not to speak English after being in
the country for many years and in the face of the clear job market
reward for learning English, is likely a sign that learning the
language is very tough for them. I'm not so sure that having
Congress tell them it's required will actually do anything."
The difficulties
adults have with learning English are at the center of the research
that Professor Bleakley has done with a fellow economist, Aimee
Chin, of the
University of Houston, in their
forthcoming Review of Economics and Statistics study "Language
Skills and Earnings: Evidence from Childhood Immigrants"
http://www.uh.edu/~achin/research/bleakley_chin_english.pdf
The study's
approach begins with a linguistic theory known as the critical
period of second language acquisition. The idea is that a child can
learn a new language as fluently as a native speaker as long as the
child starts before a critical age (usually thought to be around 11
or 12). Past the critical period, it is difficult to become fluent
in a new language and virtually impossible to speak without an
accent.
It is a theory
that can help explain why
Henry A. Kissinger, who immigrated to the
United States at about age 14, speaks English with a German accent
while his younger brother, Walter, does not. (The alternative
theory, supposedly given by Walter Kissinger, was that Henry does
not listen.) And it is a theory probably quite familiar to millions
of Americans with residual nightmares of high school French.
Professor Bleakley
and Professor Chin show rather stark evidence for this theory in the
data on immigrants' job prospects. By comparing the outcomes of
English-speaking and non-English-speaking immigrants who arrived in
the United States around the critical period age, they document that
poor English skills meant less schooling and substantially lower
wages for immigrants and that these disadvantages often extended to
their children, even if those children were born in the United
States.
One of their
simplest demonstrations of this fact compares immigrants from
different islands of the Caribbean. They document that the wages and
education levels of immigrants from non-English speaking islands
like the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico look similar to those of
immigrants from English-speaking islands like Jamaica and Trinidad —
as long as the person originally came to the United States by age
11. For those who were older when they arrived, however, immigrants
from non-English-speaking islands do significantly worse, on
average, than those from English-speaking ones. Non-English speakers
are much more likely to drop out of school and also have
significantly lower-paying jobs when working. Their finding points
strongly toward language as the deciding factor, since the
differences exist only after age 11.
Professor Bleakley
and Professor Chin extend this initial study of immigrants by asking
how immigrant parents' language skills affect their children in
"What Holds Back the Second Generation? The Intergenerational
Transmission of Language Human Capital Among Immigrants" (http://www.ccis-ucsd.org/PUBLICATIONS/wrkg104.pdf).
As a starting
point, the study notes that half the students now classified as
having low English proficiency were, in fact, born in the United
States. They are overwhelmingly the children of non-English-speaking
immigrants. So, it is natural to ask what impact parents have.
In turns out that
children whose immigrant parents came to the United States when
young do just about the same in school regardless of whether the
parents came from English-speaking or non-English-speaking
countries. But the situation is different for children whose parents
were older when they arrived. The children from non-English-speaking
households do much worse than English-speaking ones. They are less
likely to go to preschool and much more likely to drop out of high
school.
When Professor
Bleakley and Professor Chin compare the overall distribution of test
scores of English- and non-English-speaking families, they find that
the big differences appear mainly among children with the lowest
performance. The top half of students from non-English-speaking
households do just about as well as the top half from
English-speaking households. It seems that a child with talent can
succeed no matter what the parents' skills are, as has been true for
centuries in this country. But parents whose English is poor have a
big negative impact on the below-average children.
Based on his
research, Professor Bleakley sees some serious problems with the
more extreme
immigration proposals like the old
Proposition 187 in California, which sought to deny a public
education to the children of illegal immigrants.
"For many children
of immigrants," Professor Bleakley said, "the school system is one
of the only exposures to English they will get." Kicking them out of
school when they are young means they will most likely never be
fluent in English.
The current
dispute over immigration reform has been characterized as a battle
between two messages: "Welcome to America" and "Please Go Home."
Whichever message prevails in the political battle this summer,
unless directed mainly at 10-year-olds, had best come with a
translation.
Austan Goolsbee
is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate
School of Business and a research fellow at the American Bar
Foundation. E-mail: goolsbee@nytimes .com.
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