The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States draws from quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to inform educational policy and practice. It is based on cutting-edge research and policy analyses from a number of well-known experts on immigrant language minority education in the USA. The collection includes contributions on the acquisition of English, language shift, the maintenance of heritage languages, prospects for long-term educational achievement, how family background, economic status, and gender and identity influence academic adjustment and achievement, challenges for appropriate language testing and placement, and examples of advocacy action research. It concludes with a thoughtful commentary aimed at broadening our understanding of the need to provide quality immigrant language minority education within the context of globalization. This collection will be of value to students and researchers interested in promoting educational equity and achievement for immigrant language minority students.

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.

Labor markets in advanced economies have undergone substantial change in recent decades due to globalization, technological improvements, and organizational changes. Due to these developments, oral and written language skills have become increasingly important even in less skilled jobs. Immigrants - who often have limited skills in the host country language upon arrival - are likely to be particularly affected by the increase in language requirements. Despite this increase in literacy requirements, little is known about how immigrants' language proficiency is rewarded in the labor market. However, estimating the causal effect of immigrants' language skills on hiring is challenging due to potential biases caused by omitted variables, reverse causality, and measurement error. To address identification problems, we conduct a large-scale field experiment, where we send thousands of fictitious resumes to employers with a job opening. With the help of a professional linguist, we manipulate the cover letters by introducing common second-language features, which makes the resumes reflect variation in the language skills of real-world migrants. Our findings show that better language proficiency in the cover letter has a strong positive effect on the callback rate for a job interview: moving from the lowest level of language proficiency to a level similar to natives almost doubles the callback rate. Consistent with the recent development that language proficiency is also important for many low- and medium-skilled jobs, the effect of better language skills does not vary across the vastly different types of occupations we study. Finally, the results from employer surveys suggest that it is improved language skills per se that is the dominant explanation behind the language proficiency effect, rather than language skills acting as a proxy for other unobserved abilities or characteristics.

The book presents research papers published over the past four decades by leading economists George J. Borjas and Barry R. Chiswick on the economics of international migration.

The Entrepreneurial Culture highlights the subtle yet powerful influence of national cultural heritage on entrepreneurship ventures, using an alternative and fresh approach to explore the entrepreneurial culture of Chinese and Irish software firms. This book presents a unique analysis of entrepreneurship theory development, along with a single industry, cross-national study of entrepreneurship illustrating the impact of values from contrasting cultures.

At the turn of the millennium, the United States has the largest number of immigrants in its history. As a consequence, immigration has emerged once again as a subject of scholarly inquiry and policy debate. This volume brings together the dominant conceptual and theoretical work on the "New Immigration" from such disparate disciplines as anthropology, demography, psychology, and sociology. Immigration today is a global and transnational phenomenon that affects every region of the world with unprecedented force. Although this volume is devoted to scholarly work on the new immigration in the U.S. setting, any of the broader conceptual issues covered here also apply to other post-industrial countries such as France, Germany, and Japan.