Abstract
This chapter focuses on the economic analysis of what has been called the age of mass migration, 1850–1913, and its aftermath up to 1940. This has captured the interest of generations of economic historians and is still a highly active area of research. Here we concentrate on migration from Europe to the New World as this is where the bulk of the literature lies. We provide an overview of this literature focusing on key topics: the determinants of migration, the development of immigration policy, immigrant selection and assimilation, and the economic effects of mass migration as well as its legacy through to the present day. We explain how what were once orthodoxies have been revisited and revised and how changes in our understanding have been influenced by advances in methodology, which in turn have been made possible by the availability of new and more comprehensive data. Despite these advances, some issues remain contested or unresolved, and, true to cliometric tradition, we conclude by calling for more research.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, the US Immigration Act of 1882 introduced a head tax (extended in 1891); the Act of 1903 imposed restrictions on anarchists, beggars, those with epilepsy, and importers of prostitutes.
- 2.
Abramitzky et al. (2016b) provide new microdata on returners to Norway and show that despite return migrants being negatively selected relative to both movers and non-movers, they achieved higher outcomes upon return to Norway, reflecting a positive return to temporary migration.
- 3.
However, analysis of grouped data by origin country from the reports of the US Immigration Commission and of cohort occupational progression in the 1900 and 1910 censuses reaches similar conclusions (Hatton 2000; Minns 2000). For a more detailed review of this generation of studies, see Hatton (2011).
- 4.
- 5.
This behavior of resisting assimilation is also explored for French Americans in New England by MacKinnon and Parent (2012).
- 6.
Other studies in this vein are reviewed in more detail by Hatton (2011).
- 7.
Ottaviano and Peri’s (2012) method is to specify a structural model of the economy where newly arrived immigrants, long-established immigrants, and natives are different types of labor. Further, labor is differentiated by skill in terms of education and labor market experience. The elasticity of substitution between labor types is measured with the data, and then the structural model is estimated. Dustmann et al. (2016) critique this methodology because, due to occupational downgrading at arrival, immigrants’ effective skill level is lower than their observed skill level, which implies a misspecification when allocating immigrants to education-experience cells.
- 8.
On the other hand the contemporary social effects are less clear. For the extreme case of Sweden, which lost nearly a quarter of its population to the New World, Karadja and Prawitz (2016) show that areas with higher outflows had higher strike participation, welfare expenditures, and support for left-wing parties, which they argue is due to greater political power for citizens.
- 9.
Output is measured as the sum of manufacturing value added plus agricultural value added. Fractionalization measures the likelihood that two randomly selected individuals are from different backgrounds, while polarization measures the difference between the distributions of ethnicity from a bimodal distribution. See Ager and Brückner (2013) for a further discussion. Rodríguez-Pose and von Berlepsch (2017) extend the analysis to 2000 and argue that fractionalization in the late nineteenth century is positively correlated with county income in 2000, while polarization is negatively correlated.
- 10.
Burchardi et al. (2017) instrument for the number of foreign-born in a county using a mix of push factors, as proxied by the total outflow from the country to the United States, and pull factors to the specific county, which is proxied by the number of foreign-born entering the county from other continents.
- 11.
See Rodríguez-Pose and von Berlepsch (2014) on a similar long-run relationship, where instead of instrumenting immigrants with an interaction with the railroad and decade of arrival, they test the relationship with a variety of different instruments, such as distance from New York and the standard shift-share instrument. They also find that immigration had a long-run positive effect on modern-day outcomes, which they explore further by examining the effect by immigrant country of origin in a separate paper (Rodríguez-Pose and von Berlepsch 2015).
- 12.
To separate the effect of immigration from other factors on long-run growth, they interact the volatile time series of immigration with variation in when a county was connected to the railroad network; they argue that some counties received more or less immigrants not due to county-specific factors but because counties happened to be connected to the railroad during a boom decade of immigration.
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Hatton, T.J., Ward, Z. (2018). International Migration in the Atlantic Economy 1850–1940. In: Diebolt, C., Haupert, M. (eds) Handbook of Cliometrics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40458-0_41-1
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