Replication Data for: "Childhood Exposure to Co-Ethnics Increases Naturalization"

In Europe, the tendency among immigrants and descendants to seek out and interact with other co-ethnics has raised concern for their integration as it can reduce contact with the ethnic majority. Though policy makers implement large-scale integration programs to counteract these trends, it remains empirically and theoretically ambiguous whether exposure to co-ethnic peers impedes integration, and causal evidence is more limited for the growing population of migrant children. In this article, I use high quality Danish administrative panel data over 28 years to investigate whether the ethnic composition experienced in childhood among immigrants and descendants with a non-EU background affects a core behavioral indicator of integration: naturalization. To isolate the causal effect of the childhood ethnic composition, I use the quasi-experimental assignment of siblings into different school grades in the same school. I find that being exposed to co-ethnic peers in the school grade increases the probability of naturalizing later in life. The main explanation is that exposure to some co-ethnic peers improves academic skills which are positively correlated with citizenship acquisition. These findings demonstrate the causal importance of non-EU migrant children’s social environment for their later integration into the national community showing that the modest presence of co-ethnic peers can be a precondition for, not a barrier to, integration.