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.

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.

Insights from the application of economic theories and research methods to the management of linguistic diversity in an era of globalization. In an era of globalization, issues of language diversity have economic and political implications. Transnational labor mobility, trade, social inclusion of migrants, democracy in multilingual countries, and companies' international competitiveness all have a linguistic dimension; yet economists in general do not include language as a variable in their research. This volume demonstrates that the application of rigorous economic theories and research methods to issues of language policy yields valuable insights. The contributors offer both theoretical and empirical analyses of such topics as the impact of language diversity on economic outcomes, the distributive effects of policy regarding official languages, the individual welfare consequences of bilingualism, and the link between language and national identity. Their research is based on data from countries including Canada, India, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia and from the regions of Central America, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Theoretical models are explained intuitively for the nonspecialist. The relationships among linguistic variables, inequality, and the economy are approached from different perspectives, including economics, sociolinguistics, and political science. For this reason, the book offers a substantive contribution to interdisciplinary work on languages in society and language policy, proposing a common framework for a shared research area. Contributors Alisher Aldashev, Katalin Buzási, Ramon Caminal, Alexander M. Danzer, Maxime Leblanc Desgagné, Peter H. Egger, Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll, Michele Gazzola, Victor Ginsburgh, Gilles Grenier, François Grin, Zoe Kuehn, Andrea Lassmann, Stephen May, Serge Nadeau, Suzanne Romaine, Selma K. Sonntag, Stefan Sperlich, José-Ramón Uriarte, François Vaillancourt, Shlomo Weber, Bengt-Arne Wickström, Lauren Zentz

Informative and helpful essays that study census data regarding developments in Canadian society.

The economic literature on international migration interests policymakers as well as academics throughout the social sciences. These volumes, the first of a new subseries in the Handbooks in Economics, describe and analyze scholarship created since the inception of serious attention began in the late 1970s. This literature appears in the general economics journals, in various field journals in economics (especially, but not exclusively, those covering labor market and human resource issues), in interdisciplinary immigration journals, and in papers by economists published in journals associated with history, sociology, political science, demography, and linguistics, among others. - Covers a range of topics from labor market outcomes and fiscal consequences to the effects of international migration on the level and distribution of income – and everything in between. - Encompasses a wide range of topics related to migration and is multidisciplinary in some aspects, which is crucial on the topic of migration - Appeals to a large community of scholars interested in this topic and for whom no overviews or summaries exist

Do the languages people speak influence their economic decisions and social behavior in multilingual societies? This Handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine the links and tensions between economics and language to find the delicate balance between monetary benefits and psychological costs of linguistic dynamics.