The role of language in shaping international migration

Abstract

We are grateful to our anonymous referees and the editor in charge, for useful comments and suggestions, to participants at NORFACE and CReAM conference on Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge in London, EEA conference in Oslo, WISE Symposium on Contemporary Labor Economics in Xiamen, IZA AM2 2010 in Bonn, First Tempo Conference on International Migration in Dublin and NORFACE, WB and CReAM conference on “Migration, Development, and Global Issues” in London, and to Bo Honoré for helpful discussions. Jan Bryla, Anne Lund, Enric Boix and Rasmus Steffensen provided excellent research assistance within the migration and linguistic data collection process. We also thank Ignacio Ortuño and Roman Wacziarg for providing the data on linguistic diversity and genetic distance, and Tim Hatton for extrapolated data on migration stocks to the US for years 1980–9. This research was funded in part by the NORFACE research programme on Migration in Europe–Social, Economic, Cultural and Policy Dynamics (MI3-Migration: Integration, Impact and Interaction), by the Danish Research Council Project No. 09-075719 (No. 0602-01553B), from the Operational Programme Education for Competitiveness (No. CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0296), by a Czech Science Foundation grant (No. GA15-23177S) and by an SGS Research grant (No. SP2014/136). The usual disclaimer applies.