As mentioned in the video, one of the earliest nativist movements was in the __________.

1Ellis Island in New York Harbor served as the entry point for millions of immigrants arriving from Europe in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, which has come to be asymbol of the country's openness to new arrivals, was extolled in Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem, A New Colossus, forbeckoning “world-wide welcome.”

2Jencks (2001) describes the parallels between historical and contemporary immigration debates, writing that “America's current immigration debate often sounds a lot like the debate that raged early in the twentieth century. Once again many American workers see immigrants as an economic threat… Once again the great majority of Americans would prefer to keep the country homogeneous.”

3We discuss exceptions to this broad pattern in the corresponding section.

4US GDP per capita is over 5 times higher than Mexico or China today, whereas the US had GDP per capita that was only 2-3 times higher than European sending countries circa 1900.

5Classic references on internal migration in US history are Steckel (1983), Hall and Ruggles (2004) and Ferrie (2005). Collins and Wanamaker (2014) uses linked Census data to evaluate the selectivity and returns to migration for black and white migrants leaving the US South before 1930. Boustan (2009) and Boustan, Fishback and Kantor (2010) study the effect of internal migrants on existing workers in destination areas. Molloy, Smith and Wozniak (2010) address the more recent decline in the rates of internal migration in the US.

6Curtain (1972), Menard (1975), Fogel (1989), and Eltis, Lewis and Richard (2005) discuss effects of the slave trade on US population and markets. Nunn (2008)considers the effect of slave trade on the source countries.

7Hatton and Williamson (1994) include chapters on migration to Argentina, Australia and Canada, the three largest receiving countries in the period outside the US. Green, MacKinnon and Minns (2002) compare British migrants who chose to settle in the US versus Canada, and Balderas and Greenwood (2010) compare the determinants of migration to Argentina, Brazil and the US. Green and Green (1993), Green and MacKinnon (2001), and Dean and Dilmaghani (2014) study the assimilation of European immigrants into the Canadian economy. Fares to Australia and New Zealand were higher than to other destinations in this period, and information about these economies was scarcer (McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1991). Hudson (2001) discusses these effects of these impediments on migration to New Zealand. Pérez (2014) constructs panel data to study the selection and assimilation of immigrants to Argentina during the Age of Mass Migration.

8There has been surprisingly little work done on the effect of emigration on the sending regions considering the dramatic rates of out-migration from Europe during the Age of Mass Migration. Boyer, Hatton and O'Rourke (1994) and Hatton and Williamson (1998, chpt. 9) study the labor market effects of out-migration in Ireland and Sweden. Karadja and Prawitz (2015) study the effect of emigration on local political development in Sweden.

9The majority of voluntary migrants who settled in the American colonies before 1775 arrived on indentured servants' contracts (Smith, 1947; Tomlins, 2001). 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). The market rewarded servants who arrived with more skills in the form of shorter periods of indenture (Galenson 1981a, 1981b). Abramitzky and Braggion (2006) suggest that, relative to the West Indies, the mainland American colonies appeared to have attracted servants with higher levels of human capital.

10As wooden hulls and paddle wheels were replaced by iron sides and compound steam engines, trans-Atlantic travel time declined from one month in the mid-eighteenth century to eight days by 1870 (Hugill, 1993; Cohn, 2005). On the industrial organization of the steamship industry at its height, see Keeling (1999).

11See Grubb (1994) on the relationship between migrant financing and the decline in indentured servitude. The demise of indenturing in the US may also have been tied to the growth of the slave population (Galenson, 1984). Indeed, indenturing was widely used to transport Asians, primarily from India and China, after the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean sugar islands and South America in the 1830s (Engerman, 1986).

12We borrow this periodization in part from Chiswick and Hatton (2003).

13In the mid-eighteenth century, it took around one month to sail from a European port to the US. The SS Great Western, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic in 1838, completed the journey in 16 days. As ship technology improved, with wooden hulls and paddle wheels replaced by iron sides and compound steam engines, travel time declined further, reaching eight days by 1870 (Hugill, 1993; Cohn, 2005). On the industrial organization of the steamship industry at its height, see Keeling (1999).

14Shorter trans-Atlantic voyages reduced the cost of migration in part by lowering the mortality risk of the journey. In the 1840s, the mortality rate during the crossing was one in 100 (Cohn, 1984). Mortality risk was especially high for children (Cohn, 1987). Once migrant communities were established in US cities and rural areas, many prospective migrants were able to travel on pre-paid tickets financed by friends or family, thereby lowering borrowing costs (Hatton and Williamson, 1998; Carrington, et al., 1996). See also Kobrin and Day (2002) on the role of immigrant banks in facilitating migration.

15To compare immigration flows over time, note that Figure 1a does not include undocumented immigrants, which represented an additional 650,000 entrants per year during the decade of the 2000s (Hanson, 2006). Adding undocumented immigrants would double contemporary immigrant in-flows, making immigration rates more comparable today to the Age of Mass Migration.

16Other important receiving countries were Argentina, Canada and Brazil.

17Migrants represented a larger share of the labor force than the population during the Age of Mass Migration (20 percent versus 14 percent), largely because few migrants were young children. Today the gap between the foreign born share of the population and the labor force is smaller (13 percent versus 16 percent).

18BRV compare the counts of migrant inflows from newly-digitized passenger manifests to the stock of foreign-born residents in the Census and attribute the difference to return migration. This method implies that 60-75 percent of migrants returned to Europe in the 1900s and 1910s.

19The anti-immigration movement scored early victories with targeted bans against smaller immigrant groups, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; restrictions against the criminal and the “insane” in 1891; and the 1908 Gentleman's Agreement limiting immigration from Japan. In 1880, there were around 100,000 Chinese immigrants in the US (representing 3 percent of foreign-born males between the ages of 18 and 65). These pre-Exclusion Act migrants formed ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns) in many American cities (Carter, 2013). After the immigration ban, many Chinese immigrants instead settled in South America and the Caribbean.

20Legislation passed in 1921 limited immigrant arrivals to 357,000 and allocated slots on the basis of migrant stocks in the 1910 Census. These restrictions were tightened in 1924 and further amended in 1929.

21Swings in US immigration regimes mirror similar policy shifts in immigrant-receiving countries over time. Timmer and Williamson (1998) document a general shift toward restrictive border policy in many immigrant-receiving countries in the early twentieth century, which Williamson (1998) attributes in part to the political pressure of low-skilled native voters.

22Goldin (1994) finds that congressional districts with mid-sized immigrant communities (as opposed to large or small concentrations of the foreign born) and districts facing stagnant wages were the most likely to support restriction. Nationally, organized labor and residents of rural areas were the most consistent supporters of immigration restriction. Rural voters may simply have been xenophobic or may have worried about the competition that immigrants posed for their children, many of whom were moving to urban areas. On the role of nativism in depressing immigration flows in the 1850s, see Cohn (2000). Higham (2002, ori. pub. 1955) is the classic reference on nativism in US history.

23Few immigrants moved to the South. Indirectly, immigration affected southern interests by providing a steady supply of workers in northern factories, which may have forestalled the move of southern black workers to northern cities (Collins, 1997).

24King (2000, p. 247) argues that the 1965 policy change was “not designed to open the US to increasing numbers of immigrants but simply to end inequities in the selection of immigrants” (on this point, see also Massey and Pren, 2012).

25The assignment of immigration slots by hemisphere ended in 1978, in favor of a single, worldwide quota.

26See facts at http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/126.pdf

27Policing the border has an ambiguous effect on the total number of undocumented migrants living in the US; fear of apprehension reduces the inflow of new undocumented migrants but also discourages existing migrants from returning home (Angelucci, 2012; Gathmann, 2008; Hanson and Spilimbergo, 1999).

28Woolston (2015) compares the educational attainment of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as young children with their younger siblings who were born in the US and shows that US citizenship has a positive effect on educational outcomes.

29Contemporary survey evidence finds that low-skilled workers are less favorable toward an open immigration policy than their higher-skilled counterparts, although the underlying cause of this association – whether concerns about labor market competition or an association between skill level and nativist attitudes – is unclear (Scheve and Slaughter, 2001; O'Rourke and Sinnott, 2006; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2007). See Citrin, et al. (1997) for an alternative reading of the survey evidence.

30This logic is drawn from Roy's (1951) model of self-selection into occupations, as applied to the migration decision by Borjas (1987); see Borjas (2014, p. 8-25) for a useful summary of this application.

31Lindert and Williamson's (2014) new inequality estimates for the US in 1860 are based on “social tables,” or counts of the population in 1-digit occupations, matched with information on labor and property income by occupation category.

32See Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson (2012) for a comparison of the US and Norwegian income distributions in 1900. Atkinson and Piketty (2007) and Atkinson, Piketty and Saez (2011) provide a broader set of cross-country comparisons. We caution that the Atkinson, et al. series begin circa 1920 and focus on the share of income earned by workers at the top of the income distribution, both of which may reduce the applicability to the Age of Mass Migration.

33Cohn (1992) instead finds that, during the antebellum period, British migrants were drawn from both the richest occupations (farmers) and the poorest (laborers), with the skilled artisans underrepresented in the migrant flow.

34Kosack and Ward (2014) use heights to assess the selection patterns of Mexican migrants into the US at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their results suggest positive selection: migrants from Mexico were on average four to five centimeters taller than Mexican conscripts. See also Greenwood (2007, 2008)on migrant selection by age and gender.

35Hatton (2010) provides a thorough review of this literature (see p. 942-949).

36See Moretti (1999) on the role of social networks on migration from Italy during the Age of Mass Migration.

37Caponi (2011) uses a structural approach to estimate the skill distribution of Mexican immigrants into the US. He finds that Mexican immigrants into the US are positively selected in terms of ability.

38Gould and Moav (2010) argue that patterns of migrant selection can differ across skill categories. Education, in particular, may reflect “general” skills, while other labor market skills may be “country-specific.” They show that Israeli emigrants are positively selected in terms of education but are drawn from the middle of the distribution of unobserved skills, as proxied by residual wages.

39Members of different skill groups may also have different values for US-specific amenities, including cultural diversity and political freedoms like the right to vote (see Vigdor, 2002 for one application of this idea).

40Jasso and Rosenzweig (2008) and Antecol, Cobb-Clark and Trejo (2003) compare the immigrant selection system in the US to those used in Australia and Canada.

41Selection patterns of internal migrants who can move at will also shed light on migrant selection in the absence of policy restrictions. Molloy, Smith and Wozniak (2011) and Malamud and Wozniak (2012) find that college graduates are more likely to move across state lines; this pattern would be consistent with the Roy model if these highly-skilled migrants tend to settle in states where the return to skill is high (Dahl, 2002). See also Robinson and Tomes (1982), Borjas, Bronars and Trejo (1992) and Abramitzky (2009).

42In contrast, migrants from the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), an associated state of the US, are positively selected on educational attainment and pre-migration earnings, despite moving from a more unequal sending country (Akee, 2010).

43In contrast, Angelucci (2012) finds that an exogenous increase in wealth induced by the Mexican program Oportunidades increased the probability of migrating to the US.

44Relatedly, Spitzer (2014) argues that migrant networks helped Jews flee waves of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian empire.

45Other panel analyses of immigrant assimilation using data from various countries include Borjas (1989), Hu (2000), Edin, Lalonde and Aslund (2000), Duleep and Dowhan (2002), Constant and Massey (2003), Eckstein and Weiss (2004) and Kim (2011).

46The more rapid assimilation of cohorts arriving in the 1960s, when the foreign born share of the labor force was small, is consistent with the idea that immigrants compete more readily with other immigrants. Assimilation may be slower in periods of mass migration.

47Mattoo, et al. (2008) argue that, unlike educated immigrants from Asian countries and Western Europe, educated immigrants from Latin America and Eastern Europe do not hold jobs commensurate with their skill level. They attribute this pattern to differences in the quality of education across sending countries.

48Immigrants experienced a notable degree of upward mobility in the antebellum period. Ferrie (1994, 1997, 1999) links passenger lists from ship registers to the Censuses of 1850 and 1860. More than half of immigrants who arrived in unskilled occupations moved up the occupational ladder over twenty years. Immigrants' wealth also increased by an average of 10 percent with each year spent in the US. Ferrie does not compare immigrants to natives directly.

49Hannon (1992) finds a similar pattern in individual-level earnings data from the copper mining industry in Michigan.

50Moving into farming was a more frequent avenue of upward mobility for natives than for immigrants (Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson, 2014). Hence, excluding the farm sector can bias the results towards finding faster relative income growth for immigrants.

51However, the average immigrant in the cross-sectional data, which included many temporary migrants, did earn less than the native born, consistent with the general finding of lower immigrant earnings in this period.

52Contemporary studies have data on individual earnings, whereas studies using historical Census data rely on occupation-based earnings measures. We replicated the analysis in Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson (2014) using the 1970-1990, 1980-2000, and 1990-2010 census repeated cross sections and document two facts: First, the initial occupational earnings penalty faced by immigrants is not fully closed in the repeated cross section in any of the periods. Even after more than 20 years in the US, the average immigrant earns about 5-10 percent less than the average native. Second, this initial difference has been growing, from 10 percent in the 1970s to more than 15 percent in the most recent sample.

53Chiswick (1991, 1992) argues that Jewish immigrants faced an initial disadvantage in occupational status in this period but were able to catch up with the native born after around 15 years in the US; this convergence rate is typical of what is commonly found using cross-sectional data.

54See Borjas (1992) on the concept of ‘ethnic capital.’

55Bandiera, et al. (2015) show that compulsory schooling laws were first introduced in US states that received more immigrants from countries that lacked compulsory schooling rules.

56Today, policy makers debate the benefits of teaching immigrant children in English immersion classrooms or in separate bilingual settings; Chin, Daysal and Imberman (2013) find that English-language learners are equally well served by both methods but that bilingual education benefits native English speakers by limiting their contact with non-English speaking peers.

57The dissimilarity index can be interpreted as the share of immigrant households that would need to move such that each neighborhood would reflect the overall immigrant share in the population. In the context of racial segregation, a dissimilarity index of 35 is considered low, while an index value of 55 is considered moderate.

58Beaman (2012) argues that members of an ethnic network face a tradeoff: network members may provide job referrals to new arrivals, but they also may compete with each other over employment in an occupational niche.

59Collins and Margo (2000) study the effect of segregation on a number of socioeconomic outcomes for African Americans from 1940 to 1990. They find little or no evidence of negative effects of segregation prior to 1980, while negative effects in more recent times.

60Edin, Fredriksson and Aslund (2003) and Damm (2009) analyze refugee settlement policies in contemporary Sweden and Denmark, respectively, in which residential location is quasi-randomly assigned. See also Cutler, Glaeser and Vigdor (2006) on the effect of living in an immigrant enclave.

61Moser (2012) exploits a change in attitudes towards a particular immigrant group – German-Americans after the outbreak of World War I – to evaluate the effect of discrimination on immigrants' economic opportunities. She shows that, during (but not before) the war, men of German ancestry were more likely to be excluded from seats on the New York Stock Exchange.

62More broadly, Guest (1982) and Morgan, Watkins and Ewbank (1994) find that the fertility levels of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were higher than those of natives, but that this difference decreased in the second generation. Morgan, et al. also document substantial differences in fertility rates across immigrant groups, with “new” immigrants exhibiting higher fertility levels.

63Immigrants also converged with natives in marriage behavior. Foley and Guinnane (1999) show that, after controlling for relevant socio-economic characteristics, the marriage patterns of Irish immigrants were similar to those of the native born. Sassler and Qian (2003) find a decline in the “ethnic dispersion” in the age at first marriage throughout the twentieth century.

64Bell, Fasani, and Machin (2013) study the criminal behavior of immigrants in a contemporary setting, using variation in immigrant share and in crime rates across regions in the UK.

65In 2010, 17.5 percent of immigrants aged 25-65 report having less than a ninth grade education and 11.3 percent report having more than a college degree, compared to 1.9 percent and 10.6 of native workers.

66Despite the heavily agricultural and manufacturing-based economy, Ager and Brückner (2013) find that a higher level of cultural fractionalization was associated with higher output growth at the county level during the Age of Mass Migration, although, somewhat puzzlingly, cultural polarization (which is highly correlated with fractionalization) had the opposite effect.

67Boustan (2009) adapts the national skill group-based approach to study the effect of internal black migration from the South on the wages of existing black and white workers in the North in the mid-twentieth century.

68Ottaviano and Peri (2012) use national, skill-group variation as in Borjas (2003). However, we view this paper's main contribution to be its modification of the standard assumption of perfect substitutability between immigrants and natives. Borjas, Grogger and Hanson (2008) question the methods in the working paper version of this study. Recent work by Doran, et al. (2015) shows that firms are unable to hire a high-skilled immigrant because they lost the H-1B lottery experience no declines in patenting rates, suggesting that native and foreign workers are good substitutes, at least at the upper end of the skill distribution.

69Earlier, now-classic reviews of the literature include Borjas (1994) and Friedberg and Hunt (1995).

70Biavaschi (2013) finds much smaller effects at the state level over a long period (1900-50). Hatton and Williamson (1998, chapter 8) and O'Rourke and Williamson (1999, chapter 8) use time series data instead to estimate the effect of mass migration on wages.

71See also Hornbeck (2012) and Long and Siu (2013) on migration responses to the Dust Bowl.

72In contrast, Carter and Sutch (2008) argue that immigrants did not crowd out natives during this period because native- and foreign-born workers migrated to the same set of counties.

73This observation is in line with the Malthusian idea that – in an economy without capital – a higher population depresses income.

74Munshi and Wilson (2010) and Rodriguez-Pose and von Berlepsch (2014) argue that European migration had long-lasting effects on economic activity at the local level through its effects on institutions and culture.

75Hornung (2014) studies another forced high-skilled immigration – that of the Huguenots from France to Prussia in the seventeenth century. The arrival of Huguenots, who carried with them specialized knowledge of textile manufacturing, was associated with higher productivity in the local manufacturing sector.

76A number of papers study the relationship between immigration and innovation in the contemporary period. Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2010) find that college-educated immigrants increase patent rates at the state level. The influx of foreign doctoral students has also positively influenced scientific output in US academic departments (Stuen, Mobarak and Maskus, 2012). Yet, Borjas and Doran (2012) show that the sudden arrival of Russian mathematicians into the US academy after the fall of the Soviet Union reduced the output of competing American mathematicians, leading to no net increase in overall output.

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Panel A: Foreign born flow as percentage of the US population (1820-2010)

Panel B: Foreign born stock as percentage of the US population (1850-2010)

Source: Authors' calculations based on US Historical Statistics (Panel A) and IPUMS samples of US Census (Ruggles, et al., 2010) (Panel B). Immigrant flows in Panel A include only legal entrants, leading to an undercount particularly after 1965.

Click on the image to see a larger version.