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. 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.

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自 1980 年以来，美国已通过官方难民安置计划接纳了超过 300 万难民。学者们将难民群体的成功归功于政府的同化和融合计划。然而，在 1948 年之前，难民在没有正式的甄选程序或联邦支持的情况下抵达。我们使用大量记录的口述历史访谈来研究历史难民的融合，以了解二十世纪初抵达的移民的语言水平。通过对词汇、语法和口音言语的细粒度测量，我们发现难民移民比经济/家庭移民获得了更深入的英语词汇，即使在比较来自同一原籍国或宗教团体的移民时，这一发现也成立。我们的研究结果与这样的假设是一致的：由于难民抵达时的条件以及他们无法立即返回原籍国，因此他们更多地接触英语或更有动力去学习。

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