The Impact of Immigration on American Import Trade in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Studies of the contemporary period for the United States and for Canada have established that the presence of an immigrant population is associated with an increase in trade between the immigrants' host and origin countries. We wish to discover if such a protrade phenomenon was systematically associated with the massive inflow of immigrants to the United States during the 40 years preceding World War I. Applying a gravity model to U.S. imports of 78 commodities from 17 countries at five-year intervals, we find support for a broad pro-import immigrant effect, especially for more fmished and more differentiated goods.

Market structure and the link between migration and trade

“…This is quite surprising given the high proportion of foreigners and its geographical position in the heart of Europe. Trade-migration effects have been studied for the United States (Gould 1994;Dunlevy and Hutchinson 1999), Canada (Head and Ries 1998;Wagner et al 2002), and the United Kingdom (Girma and Yu 2002). Switzerland has a smaller surface area and greater population density than the United States and Canada (30 inhab/km 2 for the United States, 3 inhab/km 2 for Canada and 177 inhab/km 2 for Switzerland 2 ), so one would expect to find more social interaction in the country boosting the business network and cultural transmission.…”

Does Immigration Stimulate Foreign Trade? Evidence from Sweden

“…Dunlevy and Hutchinson (1999) provide evidence in this direction. Hatzigeorgiou (2010) finds that migrant stocks are exogenous to levels of bilateral trade.…”

“…However, the theory assumes that the preference effect is negligible if the share of immigrants is small compared with the overall domestic population. Also, any such effect is unlikely to last as most goods are substitutable (see e.g., Dunlevy and Hutchinson, 1999;Girma and Yu, 2000). Finally, while the preference effect only has a potential impact on imports, better information channels have the potential to increase both imports and exports.…”

Partition, Migration, and Jute Cultivation in India

“…While these effects are difficult to quantify, studies have linked mass migration to, inter alia, environmental degradation in China (Ta et al, 2006), convergence among OECD countries before 1913 (Taylor and Williamson, 2006), and state security in the interwar period (Rudolph, 2003). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of European immigrants came to the United States, and their arrival has been linked to several outcomes, including the growth of wage inequality (Margo and Villaflor, 1987), the composition of imports (Dunlevy and Hutchinson, 1999), and the timing of black migration out of the South (Collins, 1997). Other studies have stressed the capacity of receiving economies to absorb migrants, showing that they have only minor effects on native labor market outcomes in the US (Altonji and Card, 1991;Borjas, 1991;Goldin, 1994;Grossman, 1982) and Israel (Friedberg, 2001).…”

“…Empirically, Dunlevy and Hutchinson (1999) find that trade and migration are complements, as immigrants purchase goods produced in their home countries. Collins et al (1997), similarly, find that during the first wave of globalization, the substitutability of trade and migration can be soundly rejected.…”