10.7910/DVN/HMMGJ5 Ran Abramitzky Ran Abramitzky Stanford & NBER Leah Boustan Leah Boustan Princeton & NBER Peter Catron Peter Catron U Washington Dylan Connor Dylan Connor Arizona State Rob Voigt Rob Voigt Northwestern Harvard Dataverse 2023 Social Sciences Ellis Island transcripts Peter Catron Peter Catron U Washington 2023-08-22 2023-08-22 224956279 application/zip 1.0 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. This study improves on previous research on immigrant language acquisition and refugee incorporation, which typically rely on self-reported measures of fluency. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country. These patterns provide an optimistic historical precedent for the incorporation of refugees into American society.