Does Multiculturalism Work? Language, Friendship Homophily, and Well-Being of Immigrants in Canada

Abstract

Multiculturalism is under attack in its birthplace, Canada. I revisit the connection between the two pillars of Canadian multiculturalism, namely acceptance of English and French as the official languages and respect and sharing among all cultural groups. A unique dataset, the 2002 Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, is used to analyze how learning more languages affects ethnic composition of people's social networks, which I propose as an indicator for social integration of new immigrants. I find that learning the official languages or learning more languages in general increases the ethnic diversity of a person's network. The economic and social well-being of immigrants are related to their language skills and ethnic composition of their social networks. The findings are generally in favor of advocates for multiculturalism.