Backlash: The Unintended Effects of Language Prohibition in U.S. Schools after World War I

By Vasiliki Fouka. The Review of Economic Studies, 2019

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Do forced assimilation policies always succeed in integrating immigrant groups? This article examines how a specific assimilation policy—language restrictions in elementary school—affects integration and identification with the host country later in life. After World War I, several U.S. states barred the German language from their schools. Affected individuals were less likely to volunteer in World War II and more likely to marry within their ethnic group and to choose decidedly German names for their offspring. Rather than facilitating the assimilation of immigrant children, the policy instigated a backlash, heightening the sense of cultural identity among the minority.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b3e21ce50b576fb96942d7aa884d7fd9aa130b6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. M. Tabellini
2. David Y. Yang
3. Leonardo Bursztyn

In Sociology and Political Science

1. M. Tabellini
2. David Y. Yang
3. Leonardo Bursztyn

Citations in the corpus

• Misperceptions About Others (2021, result): “This stands in contrast with the small but emerging literature that documents cases of backfiring in response to explicit attempts to shape individuals’ beliefs and attitudes (e.g., Fouka 2020).”
• Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2019, background): “43This finding is somewhat in contrast with Goldin (1994), possibly because she focused on a different sample of cities and used a different empirical strategy.”