Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract

In this paper, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring signi…cant economic prosperity to receiving areas. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants' location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. Immigration increased natives' employment and occupational standing, and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. However, despite these economic bene…ts, it triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower public goods provision. Stitching the economic and the political results together, I provide evidence that natives'backlash was, at least in part, due to cultural di¤erences between immigrants and natives, suggesting that diversity might be economically bene…cial but politically hard to manage.

Happily Ever after: Immigration, Natives’ Marriage, and Fertility

“…Our findings are also somewhat different from those of some contemporaneous cross-city design studies that estimate a zero effect of immigration on natives' wages (Card, 2001(Card, , 2005. However, they are consistent with a recent body of the literature which documents a positive impact of immigrants on natives' occupational mobility (Foged and Peri, 2016), and more specifically for this historical period with Tabellini (2017).…”

“…This effect is statistically significant and economically large especially for manufacturing laborers -one of the jobs with the highest exposure to immigrants' competition and with the lowest skill requirements. Moving rightward along the graph, the three (blue) bars on the right show that 27 Similar results are obtained in Tabellini (2017), who studies the effects of immigration on natives' employment in the age range 15-65. 28 We proxy for the degree of immigrants' competition using the ratio of the probability that natives and immigrants held a given occupation in 1910 (see also Table A.6).…”

“…In this context, immigrants provided a cheap and unskilled supply of labor which could not only be absorbed, but that may have even allowed industries to expand (Foerster, 1924), in turn creating new job opportunities for native workers (Tabellini, 2017). It is thus possible that, by increasing the supply of "marriageable men", immigration raised fertility and marriage rates not only of native women, but also of native men.…”

“…collected data on city population, on the number of immigrants by country of origin at the city and at the national level, and on most of the outcomes considered in our analysis, including marital status, relationship to the household head, and the number of children. 9 To investigate the mechanisms, we also collected data on employment, labor force participation, and occupation of native men of age 20 to 65 from the US Census, and on several measures of economic activity and industrialization from the 1904 to 1929 quinquennial Census of Manufactures (Tabellini, 2017). 10 Table 1 reports the summary statistics for the main variables used in our analysis.…”

Performance, Diversity and National Identity Evidence From Association Football

“…Others suggest that there are adverse effects due to potential transaction costs which arise due to conflicting expectations among team members, different cultural traditions, communication deficiencies 2. Whether immigration benefits or hurts the economy has been a matter of intense research over the past decade (Borjas 2016;Collier 2013;Docquier, Ozden, and Peri 2014;Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle 2010;Peri and Sparber 2009;Tabellini 2018). associated to the use of different languages, or conflict management (de Jong and van Houten 2014; Haas and Nüesch 2012;Stahl et al 2010;Trax, Brunow, and Suedukum 2015).…”