Deprivation, Segregation, and Socioeconomic Class of UK Immigrants: Does English Proficiency Matter?

Arbeitspapier

This paper studies the causal effect of English proficiency on residential location outcomes and the socioeconomic class of immigrants in England and Wales, exploiting a natural experiment. Based on the phenomenon that young children learn a new language more easily than older children, we construct an instrument for English proficiency using age at arrival in the United Kingdom. Taking advantage of a unique dataset, we measure the extent of residential segregation along different dimensions, and find that poor English skills lead immigrants to live in areas with a high concentration of people who speak their same native language, but not necessarily in areas with a high concentration of people of their same ethnicity or country of birth. This finding could suggest that, for immigrants with poor English proficiency, what matters for their residential location decision is language spoken by residents, as opposed to ethnicity or country of birth. We also find that language skills have an impact on the occupation-based socioeconomic class of immigrants: Poor English skills reduce the likelihood of being in the occupation-based class 'higher managerial and professional' and increase that of being in the class 'self-employment'.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 11368

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination ; Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers ; Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: language skills ; deprivation ; residential segregation ; socioeconomic class

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Aoki, Yu ; Santiago, Lualhati
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2018

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/177172
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET