We provide novel evidence on the inequality of returns to immigrant skills in hosting economies. Although migrant wage gaps are well established in the literature, less is known about the origins of their heterogeneity. We propose a potential rationale for this gap related to the linguistic proximity between the destination and origin countries. We exploit individual-level data from nine diverse destination countries, with migrants from a highly heterogeneous group of origin countries, for both recent and long-term migrants. We find that lower linguistic proximity between origin and destination is associated with a higher average wage penalty for highly skilled migrants and a substantially lower position in the wage distribution.
