Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Immigration's Economic Boost Depends on Learning English

New research suggests that concentrations of newcomers who speak the same language are less likely to learn English, which reduces their earnings relative to other immigrants and relative to native-born Americans.

June 20, 2013 at 5:26 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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The Wall Street Journal published an editorial the other day arguing that new immigrants to the U.S. are "assimilating" just as well as previous cohorts of newcomers, writing that "today's immigrants are acculturating and moving up the economic ladder like previous generations."

It's certainly true that the children and grandchildren of immigrants are much better off than their parents and grandparents. However, new research from Harvard economist George Borjas suggests that the living standards of first-generation immigrants are rising toward the levels of native-born Americans more slowly than in previous decades.