The Earnings of Skilled and Unskilled Immigrants at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Most historical studies of immigration in nineteenth-century America have failed to distinguish among the labor-market experiences of different immigrant groups. Using a sample of some 4000 wage earners from turn-of-the-century Iowa, we examine the relative earnings of skilled and unskilled immigrants and suggest the factors which contributed to their very different post-immigration experiences. The results indicate that prior knowledge of a trade conferred upon immigrants an initial earnings advantage, but that unskilled immigrants managed subsequently to close some but not all of the gap by reaping greater returns to experience on the job.

Immigration in American Economic History

“…48 Using published tabulations from the Dillingham Commission reports, initial work in this area documented that, circa 1900, the average immigrant earned substantially less than the average native-born worker (Higgs, 1971; McGouldrick and Tannen, 1977; Blau, 1980). 49 In cross-sectional sources, immigrants appear to make up all or most of this gap within a generation (studies by Eichengreen and Gemery, 1986 and Hanes, 1996 are exceptions). Hatton (1997) and Hatton and Williamson (1998) analyze surveys of workers in particular industries in Michigan and California and find that immigrants enjoyed faster wage growth than natives.…”

“…Indenturing arose as a solution to the high costs of migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Galenson 1981a, 1981b, 1984). Most indentured servants were young men from the United Kingdom or Germany (Gemery, 1986). Servants worked for a defined period of time, often seven years, in exchange for passage from Europe to the New World (Grubb, 1985, 1986, 1988).…”

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

“…The earliest studies in this area (re-) analyzed the aggregate wage data published by the Immigration Commission and found that, contrary to the initial conclusions of the commission, immigrants caught up with the native-born after 10–20 years in the United States (Higgs 1971; McGouldrick and Tannen 1977; Blau 1980). Related work examined individual-level wage data from surveys conducted by state labor bureaus (Hannon 1982; Eichengreen and Gemery 1986; Hanes 1996). Although early studies of these sources found no wage convergence, Hatton (1997) argues that this discrepancy is due to specification choice.…”

Long-Run Convergence of Ethnic Skill Differentials: The Children and Grandchildren of the Great Migration

“…To construct these adjusted wages, I estimated a regression of the form 1980) and Eichengreen and Gemery (1986) provide interesting studies of the observed earnings differential between immigrants and natives at the turn of the century. 7Equally large differences among ethnic groups are found if the calculations are restricted to the subsample of immigrants who arrived between 1900 and 1910.…”