Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining birth records and population-level administrative data from the Florida Department of Education. We focus on the cumulative cohort-school-specific exposure to foreign-born students throughout the students’ educational career and we identify our parameter of interest by comparing siblings’ performances in standardized test scores in mathematics and reading. Using an identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, we find that the presence of immigrant students correlates positively with the academic achievement of US-born students, especially the disadvantaged ones. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to their immigrant schoolmates. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.