Europe's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract

During the age of mass migration (1850–1913), one of the largest migration episodes in history, the United States maintained a nearly open border, allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions. We estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection by comparing Norway-to-US migrants with their brothers who stayed in Norway in the late nineteenth century. We also compare fathers of migrants and nonmigrants by wealth and occupation. We find that the return to migration was relatively low (70 percent) and that migrants from urban areas were negatively selected from the sending population. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”——Emma Lazarus (1883)1

Immigration in American Economic History

“…Irish migrants from the pre-famine and famine periods held lower-paid occupations than men who remained at home and were more likely to report a round-numbered age; such age heaping is often used as a proxy for a lack of numeracy (Mokyr and Ó Gráda, 1982; Cohn, 1995). Norwegian migrants in a linked Census sample were more likely than non-migrants to be raised by fathers who did not own land and who held lower-paid occupations (Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson, 2012). Abramitzky, et al also find a higher return to migration within pairs of brothers than in the population as a whole, suggesting that naïve estimates of the return to migration are biased downward by negative selection for men leaving urban areas.…”

Transatlantic wage gaps and the migration decision: Europe–Canada in the 1920s

“…The idea is that potential migrants consider not just their real income as conventionally defined, but also their place on the income distribution. Abramitzky et al (2012) apply this approach to Norway finding that migrants to the USA in the late nineteenth century were negatively selected. To help reconcile the seemingly anomalous taste parameter results, we introduce status to the model through the Stone-Geary utility function (Eq.…”

“…The idea is that returns to skill differ across countries, and this can affect who migrates. In recent work, Abramitzky et al (2012) and others also explore the role of self-selection in migration decisions. 5 In this paper, we capture some features of these migration models by using an approach that shifts the emphasis from income to utility.…”

International Migration

“…Several macro papers have pointed out the relevance of inequality in the source and the destination countries in explaining immigration flows. A recent historical study (Abramitzky et al, 2012), based on a particularly rich data set of Norwegian families at the end of the nineteenth century, provides instead detailed microlevel evidence in an environment where the predictions of the model can be tested more systematically. In particular, in this article, the authors are able to compare brothers who emigrated to the United Sates, with brothers who instead remained in Norway, supplying very clean evidence in favor of Borjas' (1987) model.…”