This book focuses on educational language minority immigrant issues in the United States. It draws from quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to inform educational policy and practice. The contributions are grouped according to three broad themes: factors predicting language proficiency, the role of language and identity in the lives of immigrant language minority youth, and issues of educational policy related to this group.

We use a special Canadian dataset containing both literacy test scores and standard labour market variables to examine the impact of literacy on immigrant earnings. Having a literacy measure allows us to examine issues related to discrimination and the sources of lower returns to foreign acquired education and experience among immigrants. We find that the native-born literacy distribution (assessed in English or French) dominates that for immigrants. However, immigrantsand the native born appear to obtain the same return to their literacy skills. We argue that this does not support a discrimination explanation for immigrant-native born earnings differentials. Immigrant shortfalls in literacy can account for about one-half of the earnings gap between university educated immigrants and similarly educated native-born workers. However, low returns to foreign acquired experience have a larger impact on the differential and those low returns are not related to literacy differences. Thus, low literacy among immigrants is an important input to understanding immigrant-native born earnings differentials but is not the dominant explanation.

The implications of human capital portability -- including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching -- for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also investigate occupational mobility and observe convergence toward the occupational skill distribution of the domestic population, although four years after landing immigrants remain less likely have a high skilled job. Immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings. However, surprisingly, neither matching nor language skills have any impact on the return to pre-immigration work experience, which is observed to be statistically significantly negative. Crucially, English language skills are found to have an appreciable direct impact on earnings, and to mediate the return to pre-immigration education but not labour market experience.

Written by two internationally renowned experts in the field, this book explores the determinants of dominant language proficiency among immigrants and other linguistic minorities and the consequences of this proficiency for the labour market. Using empirical material from a range of countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia and Bolivia, the authors develop a range of models of the determinants of dominant language proficiency and use econometric techniques to test them and estimate the magnitude of the effects. This volume is an excellent resource for researchers and a fine reader for specialists in labour economics, linguistics as well as a number of other disciplines.

Current social and economic changes in Canada raise many questions. Will Canada's education system be able to maintain its competitiveness when faced with increasing globalization? Will the growing numbers of immigrants and their children be successfully integrated? How will Canada's social institutions respond to a rapidly aging population? The Changing Canadian Population assembles answers from many of Canada's most distinguished scholars, who reassess the current state of society and Canada's preparedness for the challenges of the future.