EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

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

Vasiliki Fouka

The Review of Economic Studies, 2020, vol. 87, issue 1, 204-239

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Assimilation; Educational and language policies; Ethnicity; Cultural transmission; J15; Z13; N32; I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdz024 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:1:p:204-239.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:1:p:204-239.