Language Barriers and Immigrant Health

Abstract

We study the impact of language deficiency on the health status of childhood migrants to Australia. Our identification strategy relies on a quasi-experiment comparing immigrants arriving at different ages and from different linguistic origins. In the presence of considerable non-classical measurement error in self-reported language proficiency, our results provide lower and upper bounds for a strong negative effect of English deficiency on health of between one half and a full standard deviation in the health score. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.