Recent immigrants may want to avoid the temptation of mother tongue TV
For my Ethnicity and Immigration class in my demography program, I wanted to explore how immigrants are affected by the language of the media they choose to consume. I used the New Immigrant Survey to see how media potentially affects different life outcomes.
As many new Spanish-language media outlets are becoming increasingly common, my hypothesis was that recent immigrants who choose these channels are missing out on the opportunity to improve their English-language proficiency.
Given that English proficiency is correlated with income, my theory was that those who choose Spanish-media will not be as likely to move to higher incomes. I control for variables like age, income, education, and having taken English classes previously.
I found that, as expected, English-media appears to lead to higher English proficiency which appears to lead to higher incomes.
Unfortunately, I wrote this before I appreciated the value of open data and Github, so I don't have the Stata code any longer.
