The paper uses micro-data from the Spanish National Immigrant Survey to examine an uncharted question: are multilingual immigrants
superior at learning the destination language? The article adopts an instrumental variable (IV) approach where the number
of foreign languages known by the immigrant is instrumented using the following variables: 1. the number of nationalities
of the immigrant's father and 2. the number of foreign countries where the individual has settled prior to his arrival in
Spain. Above all, these instruments pass well several validity tests. The IV estimates show that for every additional foreign
language learned by the immigrant the probability of being proficient in the destination language – Spanish – increases by
10.7 percent. This effect is equivalent to multiple years of formal education, to living in Spain for more than 4 years, and
as important as having a mother tongue linguistically close to Spanish. We find mild evidence that women reap larger benefits
from multilingualism than men (13.0 against 10.0 percent).
Keywords:Immigration Language proficiency Destination language proficiency Instrumental variables
Forschungsbereich:Arbeitsmarktökonomie, Einkommen und soziale Sicherheit