Made in America? Immigrant Occupational Mobility in First Half of the Twentieth Century

Catron, Peter

doi:10.31235/osf.io/typhg

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(37 reference statements)

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“…Broadly, these findings highlight that reception context influenced upward mobility in ways consistent with and deviating from contemporary theory (i.e., Portes and Rumbaut 2006). There has been much debate over whether manufacturing opportunities were key to the upward mobility of the historical second generation (see Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Waldinger 2007; Catron 2016). For the Irish second generation at least, this analysis provides little support for the claim that manufacturing mattered.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility: A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants

Connor

2018

International Migration Review

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Proponents of restrictive immigration policies often claim that families arriving with fewer skills and resources will struggle economically. This claim is challenging to test as lower-skilled migrants also tend to face greater discrimination, exclusion, and obstacles in the United States. I use unique multigenerational data on Irish Americans in the early-twentieth century, before and after migration, to directly study how the economic origins of Irish families and the reception context they faced in the United States affected economic attainment in the second generation. This analysis finds weak associations between economic background in Ireland and second-generation earnings in the United States. The schooling context and ethnic communities of settlement locations in the United States, in contrast, have strong effects on the second generation. These findings indicate that the experiences of immigrant families in the United States may be more important for second-generation attainment than the skills and resources brought from the origin country in the immigrant generation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility: A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants

Connor

2018

International Migration Review

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“…Data limitations have made it difficult to follow immigrants and their descendants across multiple generations. Yet progress is now being made on this score due to innovations in data linkages (e.g., Catron, ). Such work promises to provide new insights about the assimilation process as it unfolds across generations and over time.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spanning Borders, Cultures, and Generations: A Decade of Research on Immigrant Families

Hook

Glick

2020

J of Marriage and Family

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The authors review research conducted during the past decade on immigrant families, focusing primarily on the United States and the sending countries with close connections to the United States. They note several major advances. First, researchers have focused extensively on immigrant families that are physically separated but socially and economically linked across origin and destination communities and explored what these family arrangements mean for family structure and functions. Second, family scholars have explored how contexts of reception shape families and family relationships. Of special note is research that documented the experiences and risks associated with undocumented legal status for parents and children. Third, family researchers have explored how the acculturation and enculturation process operates as families settle in the destination setting and raise the next generation. Looking forward, they identify several possible directions for future research to better understand how immigrant families have responded to a changing world in which nations and economies are increasingly interconnected and diverse, populations are aging, and family roles are in flux and where these changes are often met with fear and resistance in immigrant‐receiving destinations.

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“…Research on immigrant success in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century focuses on numerous dimensions of assimilation. Building off Gordon's (1964) original assimilation paradigm and its later reformulations (Portes and Rumbaut 2001;Alba and Nee 2003), scholars have pointed to ethnic identity and discrimination (Goldstein and Stecklov 2016;Perlmann and Waldinger 1997;Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson and Hao, 2020), racialization (Fox 2012, Catron 2021, political incorporation (Catron 2019, Bloemraad 2006, organizations (Catron 2016), geography (Connor 2020), social context (Catron and Vignau Loria 2021;Catron 2020;Fox and Bloemraad 2015), demographic trends (Hout and Goldstein 1994;Sassler 2006;Pagnini and Morgan 1990;Morgan et al 1993) and their connection to labor market processes (Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson, 2014).…”

Section: Linguistic Assimilationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refugees without Assistance: English-Language Attainment and Economic Outcomes in the Early Twentieth Century

Abramitzky¹,

Boustan²,

Catron³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs that provide temporary assistance. Scholars have highlighted the success of refugee groups to show the positive impact of governmental programs on assimilation and integration. In the past, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment and economic outcomes of migrants who arrived before 1940. Using detailed measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved higher levels of English proficiency than did economic migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. This study improves on previous research of immigrant language acquisition, which typically rely on self-reported measures of fluency, and on studies of refugees, which typically assign refugee status based on country-of-birth alone. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees, being unable to immediately return to their origin country, may have had greater incentive to learn or be exposed to English, which increased their linguistic attainment. Our results provide an optimistic historical precedent for the incorporation of refugees into American society.

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Made in America? Immigrant Occupational Mobility in First Half of the Twentieth Century

Cited by 7 publications

References 26 publications

Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility: A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants

Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility: A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants

Spanning Borders, Cultures, and Generations: A Decade of Research on Immigrant Families

Refugees without Assistance: English-Language Attainment and Economic Outcomes in the Early Twentieth Century

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