The economic assimilation of Irish Famine migrants to the United States

Working Their Way Up? US Immigrants' Changing Labor Market Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration

“…Our record linkage procedure follows that of Collins and Zimran (2019), which belongs to a class of methods derived from Ferrie's (1996) pioneering work. 18 In brief, we began by eliminating from consideration men who are not unique in the base-year census (1850 or 1900) on their combination of name, birthplace, and birthyear (+/-4 years); for example, a match would not be attempted for a John Smith born in New York in 1820.…”

“…Instead, we construct several alternative occupational scores. The first is based on the 1870 census questions about real and personal wealth (Collins and Zimran 2019;Ager, Boustan, and Eriksson 2019;Craig, Eriksson, and Niemesh 2019). We use the complete-count sample of the 1870 census (Ruggles et al 2020) to compute average total wealth (the sum of real and personal wealth) within each detailed (three-digit) occupational cell for men aged 30 to 65.…”

“…In cases where a region-occupation cell has fewer than 100 observations, the score is based on a broad occupational category (e.g., white collar) rather than on the specific occupation. We depart from Collins and Zimran (2019), who were the first to use these scores, by basing them on the complete 1870 sample rather than the 1% sample. 31 In the case of ties (which are common due to the invariance of the score within occupational cells), we assign each individual in a category the average rank of the group.…”

Scarring and Selection in the Great Irish Famine

“…There is a wider debate ongoing in economic history on migrant selection. Recent work by Connor (2019) using US and Irish censuses finds evidence of negative selection of Irish migrations, while Collins and Zimran (2019) find intergenerational convergence of Famine-era Irish migrants to the US in terms of occupational status. More careful comparison of anthropometric datasets either side of the Atlantic is needed to tease out the full ramification of this selection.…”

Southern (American) Hospitality: Italians in Argentina and the United States During the Age of Mass Migration

“…"17 In the census data described above, there is also a negative correlation between being literate and the likelihood of reporting a multiple of five as age.18 A number of studies use this measure in the context of immigration Mokyr and Grada (1982). andCollins and Zimran (2018) use this measure to analyze the selection of Irish famine migrants, andStolz and Baten (2012) use this measure to test whether immigrant selection responded to relative inequality.…”