This project will create and analyze a novel data set following individuals who moved to the United States and their siblings who stayed in Europe during the period of mass migration in late nineteenth century. This analysis of individual migration behavior contributes to the economic history of the US and European sending countries and answers important questions in the economics of immigration.
The PIs make use of newly-digitized Censuses from two sending countries--Norway and Great Britain--as well as 100% samples of Norwegian and British migrants compiled from US Census records available on the genealogy website Ancestry.com. The PIs ask whether and to what extent migrants were positively/negatively selected from their sending populations, how to estimate the returns to migration while taking into account this selection, and how migrants and children of migrants performed in the US relative to the native-born.
The fact that migrants may not have been randomly selected from the sending population complicates the estimation of the "true" returns to migration. The first project develops a method to estimate returns to migration and infer the direction of migrant selection. The identification strategy relies on comparisons between migrants and their siblings who stayed in Europe, as well as the primogeniture laws in Europe that exogenously increased the propensity of younger brothers to migrate.
The fact that migrants may be positively (or negatively) selected from the sending population does not automatically imply that they will be more (or less) skilled than the average worker in the destination. The second project follows the career of European migrants from 20 sending countries and their children in the US. The PIs compare the labor market outcomes of cohorts of first and second generation immigrants with the outcomes of the native-born from 1900-1930. If migrants' earnings eventually overtake those of US natives, one can infer that migrants were positively selected relative to the US population.
Broader Impact: The sustained rate of high in-migration to the US during this period was historically unprecedented at the time and has yet to be surpassed. Understanding this large migrant flow has important implications for both US and European economic history. In particular, the US growth take-off in the late nineteenth century may have been reinforced by the human capital of positively selected migrants (or, alternatively, was all the more impressive for taking place while the country absorbed a negatively selected migrant flow).
This project will also facilitate comparisons between historical and contemporary immigrant flows. Immigration was subject to few policy restrictions in the late nineteenth century. While current migration patterns in part reflect policy preferences for skilled workers or family reunification, historical migration trends were driven by individual migration decisions alone. The project will inform policy by shedding light on what types of migrant selection could be expected in the absence of restrictive border policy.
Finally, a key goal of the effort to create a large linked data set of migrants and their non-migrant siblings is to make these important data publicly available for the benefit of the larger research community. These data are likely to be widely used by scholars to address various questions in labor economics, macroeconomics and economic history.
The Age of Mass Migration from Europe to the New World (1850–1913) was one of the largest migration episodes in human history. By 1910, 22 percent of the US labor force was foreign born, compared to "only" 17 percent today. In this project, we asked three related questions about this large and formative migrant flow: Were migrants who settled in the US in the late nineteenth century positively or negatively selected from the European population? What was the economic return to this migration? And how did these new migrants fare in the US labor market, both upon first arrival and after spending some time in the country? A better understanding of the Age of Mass migration can inform our views of both the past and the present. In this era, the US maintained an open border for European migrants, allowing us to observe the immigration process in the absence of government constraints. Furthermore, beliefs about (the lack of) immigrant assimilation at the time contributed to the formation and passage of the more restrictive migration policies of today. Our project greatly expands our knowledge of this era by creating and analyzing two large panel datasets of trans-Atlantic migrants from historical Census records. Our first dataset links 50,000 men from their birthplace in the 1865 Norwegian Census to their adult residence in 1900 in either the US or Norway. We focus on Norway because it is a large sending country and has two complete digitized historical Censuses (1865 and 1900). Our second dataset follows 20,000 men, including immigrants from 16 European sending countries and a comparison group of US natives, in the US labor market from 1900 to 1910 to 1920. Assembling such rich data is made possible by the public release of Census manuscripts 70 or more years after the initial survey. We match individuals across Census waves by first name, last name, age, and place of birth. We estimate a return to migration within brother pairs of around 70 percent. These returns are lower than contemporary estimates for the return to migration from Mexico to the US, as would be expected given the relatively unconstrained supply of migrant labor in this era.[i] In addition, our estimation method reveals evidence of negative occupational selection for migrants leaving urban areas. In particular, we find that the population estimate of the return to migration in the urban sample is 20 to 30 percent lower than the within-brother estimate, a pattern that we attribute to negative selection of migrant households. We find that the fathers of migrants in both rural and urban areas have lower occupation-based earnings; are less likely to own assets, including land, an owner-occupied home or a business; and, conditional on owning some land, have property of lesser value as proxied by their property tax bills. A similar pattern holds for both migration to the US and internal migration within Norway. Taken together, this evidence suggests that men with poorer economic prospects were more likely to migrate in the late nineteenth century. We further demonstrate that, among all men raised in households with assets, those who were more likely to inherit land by virtue of their birth order or the gender composition of their siblings are less likely to migrate. We then turn to the success of these newcomers in the US labor market, asking how immigrants from Norway and 15 other sending countries fared upon arrival. Contrary to the existing literature, we find that the typical immigrant in the panel did not face a large initial earnings penalty upon first arrival in the US and moved up the occupational ladder at the same rate as the native born. We conclude that the large earnings gap and subsequent convergence observed in the large literature on immigrant assimilation in this period, all of which has been based on single cross sections of data, are driven by a combination of declining skill levels across immigrant arrival cohorts, both between and within countries-of-origin, and by the departure of negatively-selected return migrants. Our study is the first to document the substantial heterogeneity in the assimilation patterns of migrants from different countries of origin. Immigrants from France, Russia and the English-speaking countries of the United Kingdom held significantly higher-paid occupations than US natives upon first arrival, while immigrants from other countries started out in equivalent or lower-paid occupations. Yet regardless of starting position, immigrants from almost every country moved up the occupational ladder at the same rate as natives, rather than progressing faster to converge with natives. As a result, any initial occupation-based gaps between immigrants and natives were preserved over time. [i] G. Hanson, "Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States," Journal of Economic Literature, 44 (2006), pp. 869-924.
