Sources of immigrants' language proficiency: Australian results with comparisons to the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America

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Abstract
Recent research on immigrants in the FRG and the USA suggests that their amount of education, the country in which they obtained it, and their labour force experience both before and after migrating all have important effects on their skills in the language of the host country. This paper explores these influences on the English language proficiency of four groups of immigrants to Australia: those from North-Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and the Third World. The data are drawn from the one per cent public use sample of the 1981 Australian Census. The models are flexible OLS specifications that permit a variety of curvilinear and interaction effects. The results generally parallel those for the FRG and the USA. One important difference from the results for the USA is that the harmful effect of foreign labour force experience is greater than the beneficial effect of labour force experience in the host country.

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