The Effects of Immigration Quotas on Wages, the Great Black Migration, and Industrial Development

The Effects of Immigration on the Economy: Lessons From the 1920s Border Closure

“…We measure the share of cultivated land planted in laborintensive (hay and corn) versus capital-intensive (wheat) cereals, following LaFortune, Tessada and Gonzalez-Velosa (2015). 30 We find that rural areas with more quota exposure were more likely to plant capital-intensive wheat and less likely to plant labor-intensive cereals after the policy.…”

“…The Dillingham Commission, which was convened by Congress in 1906 to study skill selection and probability of return migration for European migrants. Collins (1997) and Xie (2017) have studied the relationship between the border closure and the advent of the Great Black Migration. Both Tabellini (2019) and Price, vom Lehn and Wilson (2020) analyze occupationbased earnings of US-born workers in cities.…”

“…For this calculation, we proxy for capital expenditure with "cost of supplies and purchased machinery installed," because the capital expenditure series begins only in 1954. 30 We exclude cotton, the other labor-intensive crop in the LaFortune classification, because the ability to grow cotton is strongly tied to environmental conditions, but results look similar if we include it or if we focus only on the Northeast and Midwest.…”

Immigration Disruptions and the Wages of Unskilled Labor in the 1920s

“…Our paper complements a large body of research documenting the wide-ranging social and demographic effects of the end of mass immigration. Early work includes Greenwood and Ward (2015), Massey (2016), andWard (2017) that examine how the quotas of the 1920s changed the skill selection and probability of return migration for European immigrants, and Collins (1997) and Xie (2017) have studied the relationship between the border closure and the advent of the Great Black Migration. More recent studies show that immigration quotas reduced scientific discovery and patentable ideas (Doran and Yoon, 2020;Moser and San, 2020) but also had a small (but detectable) effect on dampening the spread of communicable diseases (Ager et al, 2020).…”

How the Other Half Died: Immigration and Mortality in Us Cities

“…We also contribute to the long literature on the broader implications of immigration during the Age of Mass Migration; for an overview, see Abramitzky and Boustan (2017). In terms of research design, our paper is closest to studies exploiting the quota system to identify the impact of immigration on various socio-economic outcomes (Abramitzky et al 2019;Doran and Yoon 2018;Moser and San 2020;Tabellini 2020;Xie 2017). One advantage we have compared to existing studies is that our outcome of interest-mortality-is available annually at the city level.…”