A common perception about immigrant assimilation is that association with natives
necessarily speeds the process by which immigrants become indistinguishable from natives.
Using 2000 Census data, this paper casts doubt on this presumption by examining the effect
of an immigrant’s marriage to a native, a measure of social integration, on dropout rates of
children from these marriages. Although second-generation immigrants with one native
parent generally have lower dropout rates than those with two foreign-born parents, the
relationship reverses when steps are taken to control for observable and unobservable
background characteristics. That is, immigrants that marry natives have children that are
more likely to dropout of high school than immigrants that marry other immigrants. Moreover,
gender differences in the effect of marriage to a native disappear in specifications which
control for the endogeneity of the marriage decision.