Integration of new migrants: impact of naturalization and language training.

Summary Despite the growing body of publicly available data on immigrant and immigrant-origin populations, quantitative studies of these populations are very rare in France. In particular, although the downgrading and poverty of new immigrants is now a classic research topic, few studies focus on the ways in which these new migrants can overcome their economic disadvantage. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the impact of two migration policy instruments that are likely to facilitate the integration of immigrants: the language training recently introduced as part of the Reception and Integration Contract and naturalization as a step in the integration process. The methodological challenge is significant because naturalization and language training are not random treatments: naturalized migrants are positively selected on characteristics that are unobservable to the econometrician. We use successively a discontinuity regression, a double difference estimation and a panel estimation to neutralize these selection effects. We find a small impact of language training on the French language level of migrants but we do not observe any effects on broader outcomes such as the probability of exiting unemployment, income, the number of months worked or the willingness to settle permanently. With a fixed-effects model we find no significant impact of naturalization.