A Nation of Immigrants: Assimilation and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract

During the Age of Mass Migration , the US maintained an open border, absorbing 30 million European immigrants. Prior cross-sectional work on this era finds that immigrants initially held lower-paid occupations than natives but experienced rapid convergence over time. In newly-assembled panel data, we show that, in fact, the average immigrant did not face a substantial occupation-based earnings penalty upon first arrival and experienced occupational advancement at the same rate as natives. Cross-sectional patterns are driven by biases from declining arrival cohort quality and departures of negatively-selected return migrants. We show that assimilation patterns vary substantially across sending countries and persist in the second generation.Ran Abramitzky

Human Capital Persistence and Development

“…We also provide evidence on the specific channels through which the composition of immigrants affected long-term development. Finally, while there is a large literature on the consequences of the Age of Mass Migration for the United States (e.g., Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2014), there is very little evidence for South America. Our paper is one of the first to provide evidence on the long-run effects of more skilled immigrants on economic development.…”

The labor demand was downward sloping: Disentangling migrants’ inflows and outflows, 1929–1957

“…However, at the turn of the twentieth century much of this migration was actually temporary (Bandiera et al, 2010, Abramitzky et al, 2012. The presence of a sizable outflow of primarily low-skilled migrants (Abramitzky et al, 2012) has important consequences on our understanding of how net migration has affected the U.S. Economic theory predicts that such repercussions ultimately depend on the skill distribution of in-migrants, out-migrants, and natives, their degree of substitutability in production, and the flexibility of capital.…”

“…However, at the turn of the twentieth century much of this migration was actually temporary (Bandiera et al, 2010, Abramitzky et al, 2012. The presence of a sizable outflow of primarily low-skilled migrants (Abramitzky et al, 2012) has important consequences on our understanding of how net migration has affected the U.S. Economic theory predicts that such repercussions ultimately depend on the skill distribution of in-migrants, out-migrants, and natives, their degree of substitutability in production, and the flexibility of capital. The impact of these net flows of migrants on wages in current times remains a widely debated empirical question (e.g., Card, 2001, Borjas, 2003, Ottaviano and Peri, 2012; nonetheless, analyses of such effects in the first half of the 1900s are scarce (e.g., Goldin, 1994).…”

Should Immigrants Culturally Assimilate or Preserve Their Own Culture? Individual Beliefs and the Longevity of National Identity

“…Economists have traditionally focused primarily on the consequences of immigrants' inflow on labor market outcomes (see, e.g., Chiswick 1978, Borjas 1985, Lubotsky 2007, Abramitzky et al 2014 and on political economy considerations pertaining to the functioning of the welfare states (see, e.g., Siebert 1994, Borjas andHilton 1996, Nannestad 2007). With rare early exceptions (e.g., Hillman 1994Hillman , 2002Hillman and Weiss 1999), the distinct emphasis on immigrants' cultural assimilation and integration has only recently come at the forefront of economists' scholarly agenda (see, e.g., Bisin et al 2008, Constant and Zimmermann 2008, Kuran and Sandholm 2008, Fernandez and Fogli 2009, Casey and Dustmann 2010, Manning and Sanchari 2010, Danzer and Ulku 2011, Algan et al 2012, Cameron et al 2015, Bisin and Verdier 2017.…”