Immigrant Concentration at School and Natives’ Achievement: Does the Type of Migrants and Natives Matter?

Using a rich dataset of primary school students in the Netherlands, this paper investigates the hetero- geneous effects of immigrant concentration in the classroom on the academic achievement of natives. To identify the treatment effect, it takes advantage of some features of the Dutch primary school system and uses cohort-by-cohort deviations in immigrant concentration within schools. While we report an insignificant impact of the share of immigrant classmates overall, we show that effects are heterogeneous, both in the type of immigrant classmates, and in the type of native students that are affected. Only immigrants that have been living in the country for a short period of time are found to negatively impact natives’ performance. This negative impact is stronger among natives with low parental education. We also report a negative effect of the concentration of migrants with low parental education, while migrants with high parental education are found to have no impact. The importance of taking into account heterogeneity could explain the mixed findings reported by previous literature on the topic