Immigrant concentration and ethno-linguistic diversity in the classroom: consequences for children’s well-being, social integration and academic competencies

Abstract

The educational system is a crucial institutional arena for the long-term successful integration of the children of immigrants into destination countries. We study the consequences of the presence of students with a migration background on various student outcomes in Italy, a country that experienced a rapid increase in immigration fluxes. We enrich the literature in several ways: 1) we analyze not only students’ competencies but also their well-being and social integration; 2) we investigate the joint effects of two dimensions of migrants’ presence in the classroom, namely immigrant concentration and ethno-linguistic diversity; 3) we develop an analytical design to make exposure to a level of immigrant share and ethnolinguistic diversity conditionally random. We use data collected by the National Institute for the Evaluation of the Italian School System on the entire population of students enrolled in the fifth grade (primary education) in 2014–15 (INVALSI, 2015) (n=222,365) Our findings suggest that immigrant concentration and ethno-linguistic diversity in the classroom have limited detrimental effects on student outcomes; their minor effects are widely independent of each other and approximately linear. There is weak evidence of heterogeneous impacts across students with different migration backgrounds; the impact is tiny and appears to be concentrated exclusively on first-generation students. Implications for theoretical debate and educational policies are discussed in relation to the findings.