Abstract
This study examines the relationship between language proficiency and subjective well-being among the first-generation immigrants in Australia. To address endogeneity-related concerns, we use the age at arrival and country of origin as an instrument for English proficiency. Our results show that greater proficiency in English significantly improves self-reported mental health and life satisfaction. These impacts are pronounced among subgroups of males, highly educated individuals, and older immigrants who have lived in Australia for over 30 years. Our mediation analysis suggests that physical health is one of the most important channels through which immigrants’ destination-language acquisition affects their subjective well-being.
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Data Availability
Data from the HILDA survey are available to approved researchers from government, academic institutions and non-profit organisations.
Notes
Bleakley & Chin (2010) also find that English proficiency plays an important role in immigrant social assimilation.
Given that the major destinations of immigrants are often English-speaking countries, we assume that language proficiency implies skills in English.
Elsner et al. (2018) find that for immigrants, networks that are integrated in the host country lead to better outcomes after migration as well‐integrated networks provide more accurate information on local labour markets.
The information regarding individuals’ English proficiency is provided from 2002.
In Sect. 5, we divide the sample into those who stayed in Australia for 10–30 years and those who stayed for 30–50 years to find out heterogeneous effects.
From the 2002 wave, immigrants were asked: “Do you speak any language other than English at home?” If the response was “Yes,” immigrants were asked: “Would you say you speak English?” Then the answer would be one of the following: “Very well,” “Well,” “Not well,” and “Not at all.”
Using this instrument, Bleakley & Chin (2004, 2010) estimate the effect of English proficiency on earnings and social outcomes in the U.S. Clarke & Isphording (2016) and Guven & Islam (2015) investigate the effect of language skills on physical health and social integration of Australian immigrants, respectively.
The educational attainment of immigrants differs depending on immigrant generation and the age at which the immigrant arrives in the host country (Chiswick & DebBurman, 2004; Cortes, 2006; Gonzalez, 2003). Immigrants who arrived before their teen years do not have an earnings deficit relative to observationally equivalent native-born people (Bleakley & Chin, 2004; Chiswick & DebBurman, 2004).
Because of the country of origin and age dummy variables, Eq. (1) can be thought of as a difference-in-differences equation, where the difference in English skills between early and later arrivals from an NES country is compared with the difference in English skills between early and later arrivals from an ES country (Tam & Page, 2016).
Although the IV estimates are higher than the OLS estimates, one must be careful about interpreting these results. As Bleakley & Chin (2004) and Clarke & Isphording (2016) point out, measurement errors in self-reported measures of English language skills can affect OLS and IV results in different directions, in particular when the endogenous variable is an indicator variable. The measurement error could cause OLS estimates to be downward biased, while it might inflate IV estimates in estimating the effect of English skills. Thus, our OLS estimates can be interpreted as a lower bound with regard to the effect of language proficiency on the subjective well-being of Australian immigrants, while the IV estimates provide an upper bound.
The results do not directly show that the estimates by subgroup are significantly different each other.
Two indices are created by using a series of 10 questions in the HILDA self-completed questionnaire. For example: “Do you always feel very lonely?,” “Do you seem to have many friends?,” and “When you are down, do you have someone who always cheers you up?.” Some questionnaires are positive, while others are negative. Therefore, using factor analysis, we create two indices; the one that is mainly loaded with negative questions is called the social isolation index, and the one that is mainly loaded with positive questions is called the social capital index. Both social capital indices are standardized with a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1. Weekly social event is a binary indicator, that is, it equals 1 if a respondent socializes with a friend or family member who does not live with him or her at least once a week.
This is the Sobel-Goodman mediation test.
The weak first stage for a mediator variable could introduce a bias with regard to direct and indirect effects.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments made by the Co-editor, Stephanie Rossouw, and two anonymous referees. We also thank Andrew Clarke, Youjin Hahn, Asadul Islam, Robin Sickles, and conference and seminar participants at Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society 2018, International Panel Data Conference 2018, Yonsei University, Monash University, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for their helpful comments. Hee-Seung Yang acknowledges the financial support from Yonsei University (Yonsei Signature Research Cluster Program (2021-22-0011)).
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Lee, J., Niu, A. & Yang, HS. Language Proficiency and Subjective Well-being: Evidence from Immigrants in Australia. J Happiness Stud 23, 1847–1866 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00474-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00474-2