According to World Immigration Report 2020, the scale of international migration and displacement has increased in recent years due to various reasons (McAuliffe et al., 2019). Some countries now have to accommodate large numbers of school-age immigrants. School achievement of immigrant children differs widely across countries which might be caused by, among other factors, different immigration and education policies (Behr & Fugger, 2020). For example, in terms of PISA mathematics and reading achievement, first-generation immigrant students perform worse than students without an immigrant background in most countries (Agirdag & Vanlaar, 2018; Schleicher, 2015).

For this study, we have chosen five Anglophone countries: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA. In the previous literature, immigrants have been categorised as (a) those intended mainly to benefit the native-born and host country through the admission of generic workers (i.e., labour immigration) and (b) those intended primarily to benefit immigrants through the admission of particular individuals (selective immigration) (Hochschild & Cropper, 2010). To attract skilled immigrants, Australia, Canada, and the UK gave the most incentives in the early 2000s, whereas the US gave the fewest (Lowell, 2005).

In this background, the study seeks to answer the following research questions:

• What are the trends in school achievement levels for immigrants (both first and second generation) compared to the native population across the five anglophonic countries?
• Do the differences persist after accounting for various socio-economic characteristics and school characteristics that are likely to effect achievement?
• Which countries have the highest and lowest likelihood of greater school achievement for the immigrants?   
• Is the likelihood of performance impacted by the school diversity?

This study analysed the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development in 2018 (OECD, 2019b). PISA (2018) collected data from 15-year-old students across 79 countries and tested their mathematics, science and reading achievement levels. Additionally, PISA gathers a wide range of background information concerning students, parents, teachers, principals, and schools to gain some insights into how contextual characteristics influence student performance levels. As the focus of this study is on Anglophone nations, the analysis was restricted to the five English-speaking education systems in PISA 2018: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. PISA employs a two-stage stratified sampling strategy. In the first stage, schools are selected using a probability selection based on the number of students enrolled in the school. In the second stage, a sample of students are randomly selected within each selected school. Due to the stratified sampling process, hierarchical linear models are constructed to account for the nesting of students in respective schools. In addition, we also include the probability weights to ensure the representativeness of our sample to the population. The results from random intercepts, random slopes, and cross-level interaction models are demonstrated across the countries after controlling for various student and school-level characteristics.

Findings reveal that there is no significant difference in the performance of first-generation students compared to the native students across all five countries. However, with the students who are categorised as second generation (those whose parents are born in a different country) there are mixed patterns. The context of Ireland and UK is unique in demonstrating that the likelihood of second-generation to perform worse compared to the natives. In Australia, USA and New Zealand, the odds of second-generation students performing better than the natives are higher. In Australia and the USA, there is also heterogeneity in the effects of being an immigrant across schools. The effects are starker or higher in low performing schools. The effects (slopes) do not vary significantly across schools in the contexts of New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. In the context of UK, it is important to highlight that the performance of immigrants is equally poor across the schools. The paper further discusses the interpretation of the findings in the context of diversity of immigration patterns across different countries and highlights some policy implications to bridge the inequality among immigrants and the native student populations.

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