Beyond Language Proficiency: Understanding the Role of National Identification in Shaping Attitudes toward Immigrants

Many studies argue that intergroup relations between immigrants and natives are influenced by perceptions of cultural distance. They claim that natives tend to favor immigrants who are fluent in the host society’s language, which is operationalized by researchers as a sign of cultural assimilation and identification with the host society. This work assumes that language proficiency is a reasonable manifest indicator of the latent trait of national identification, even though these two concepts, although potentially related, are theoretically distinct. Our study aims to disentangle the relationship between immigrants’ language proficiency and their national identification in the context of the United States. We conducted pre-registered vignette and conjoint experiments to achieve this goal with national samples of 3,325 and 4,201, respectively. The results from the vignette experiment indicate that natives exhibit a preference for immigrants who not only possess fluent English skills but also independently strongly identify with the United States. Notably, the effect size for national identification is significantly larger than for language proficiency. These findings are further supported by the results from the conjoint experiment, which incorporates a broader range of immigrant attributes. Our results highlight the interrelated yet distinct nature of national identification and language proficiency. The broader takeaway is that relying solely on language proficiency as a measure of national identification can yield biased results and lead to misleading conclusions. Our findings have implications for the literatures on immigration and for experiments that use language proficiency as an experimental treatment.