The Unexpectedly Small Wage Return for English Fluency among Recent U.S. Refugees

Abstract

Previous studies have estimated that English fluency raises US immigrants’ wages around 17-33 percent. This paper re-estimates that return for a sample of recent refugees, a group that has not had time to improve its fluency after arrival and is less likely to have been strongly selected on ability into the labor force. The new estimates indicate that these workers receive a much smaller return to English, suggesting that the returns to fluency estimated previously did not reflect language requirements of workers’ jobs, but rather reflected unobserved skills, job-skill matching, or else arose through post-migration mechanisms like job-shopping or networking.