Search EdWorkingPapers

Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.

Keywords
Immigrant students; Educational attainment
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/kqe1-bb79

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Figlio, David, Paola Giuliano, Riccardo Marchingiglio, Umut Özek, and Paola Sapienza. (). Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students. (EdWorkingPaper: 21-368). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/kqe1-bb79

Machine-readable bibliographic record: RIS, BibTeX