Banning immigrants’ languages can backfire. Just ask Ohio and Indiana.

Swept up in the sauerkraut-is-now-liberty-cabbage nationalist hysteria surrounding World War I, Ohio and Indiana sought to force their large German minorities to assimilate by banning the German language in schools in 1919.
New evidence shows that their heavy-handed approach backfired. The Supreme Court struck down the bans in 1923. But students who grew up under the bans were less likely to assimilate, according to an analysis by Stanford political scientist and economist Vicky Fouka soon to be published in the Review of Economic Studies.

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