Impact of immigration on student's outcomes

The humanitarian crisis triggered by Venezuela’s political and socioeconomic instabilities in mid-2010s has led to the most significant movement of refugees and migrants in the recent history of Latin America and the Caribbean. We explore this episode as a natural experiment to investigate the effects of forced migration on students’ academic performance. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we found larger increases in average math test scores of 5th graders in Brazilian schools that experienced larger increases in the share of Venezuelan students between 2015 and 2019. On language, no impact on average test scores was found, but there was a positive impact on the median and a reduction in test score dispersion. The heterogeneity analysis shows a larger impact on schools presenting worse school quality indicators in the pre-immigration period.