The role of language in shaping international migration.

This paper examines the importance of language in international migration from multiple angles by studying the role of linguistic proximity, widely spoken languages, linguistic enclaves and language-based immigration policy requirements. To this aim we collect a unique dataset on immigration flows and stocks in 30 OECD destinations from all world countries over the period 1980-2010, and construct a set of linguistic proximity measures. Migration rates increase with linguistic proximity and with English at destination. Softer linguistic requirements for naturalization and larger linguistic communities at destination encourage more migrants to move. Linguistic proximity matters less when local linguistic network are larger.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Economic Journal

• Publication date

  2015-08-01

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Linguistics, Political Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/ECOJ.12231PMID 27330195PMCID PMC4911197
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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