Economic Opportunity and the Responses of “Old” and “New” Migrants to the United States

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 1978, Pages 901-917

  Dunlevy, James A ^a,b   Gemery, Henry A ^a,b  

^a AUBURN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Health Services and Department of Biology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84974325953     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700087155     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York, 1907), pp. 69-70.
2. The following section relies on the Reports of the Immigration Commission, especially Abstracts, vol. 1 (Washington, 1911), pp. 12-37.
3. Ibid., p. 171, Tables 3 and 4, and p. 182, Tables 16 and 17.
4. Ibid., p. 183, Table 18.
5. Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago, 1960), p. 252;
6. Isaac A. Hourwich, Immigration and Labor (New York, 1912), observes that similar arguments had been advanced in the 1880s against German and other “old” immigrants.
7. Jones, American Immigration, p. 295. For references on nativism, see p. 338.
8. Edward A. Ross, “The Significance of Emigration: Comment,” American Economic Review (Mar. 1912), 86, as cited in
9. Lowell E. Gallaway, Richard K. Vedder, and Vishwa Shukla, “The Distribution of the Immigrant Population in the United States: An Economic Analysis,” Explorations in Economic History 11 (Spring 1974), 213-26, 215.
10. Oscar Handlin submitted the Immigration Commission Reports to a detailed critique in his Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston, 1957), Chapter 5. He concluded that the Reports' comments were largely dictated by an a priori assumption and “… not from any evidence—whatever that was worth; sometimes indeed they ran altogether against such evidence” (p. 103).
11. Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway in “Settlement Patterns of American Immigrants, 1850-1968,” peripherally observe that their results indicate that “… the differences in behavior patterns of the various nationality groups do not seem to lend much credence to the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ immigrant behavior,” in Fifth international Congress of Economic History, Papers, vol. Ill, Hermann Van der Wee, Vladimir A. Vinogradov, and Grigorii G. Katovsky, eds. (Moscow, 1976), p. 142.
12. Data on income and employment are found in Everett S. Lee, A. R. Miller, C. P. Brainerd, and R. A. Easterlin, eds., Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, 18701950, Methodological Considerations and Reference Tables (Philadelphia, 1957), pp. 609-21, 753; the South classification is the census region; population and migrant stock data are available from the 1900 Census.
13. These data are contained in the Annual Reports of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of the Treasury. Since these data cover only steerage arrivals, they have the advantage of economic homogeneity in addition to the grouping by nativity. The loss of observations on the settlement plans of the more affluent and of those who entered overland through Canada—primarily the British and Irish—may be, for those nativities, a serious shortcoming. For a discussion of these points see Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, “The Geographical Distribution of British and Irish Emigrants to the United States After 1800,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 19 (Feb. 1972), 19-35;
14. Gallaway, Vedder, and Shukla, “The Distribution…”; and
15. James A. Dunlevy and Henry A. Gemery, “British-Irish Settlement Patterns in the United States; The Role of Family and Friends,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 24 (Nov. 1977), 257-63.
16. For example, Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, “The Settlement Preferences of Scandinavian Emigrants to the United States, 1850-1960,” Scandinavian Economic History Review, 18 (Fall 1970), 159-76, and
17. Vedder and Gallaway, “British and Irish Emigrants,” have expressed a belief that migrants avoided the South because of an allegedly hostile social climate. Empirical support for this position, however, has been mixed.
18. An extensive literature has developed regarding the family and friends effect. See, for instance Phillip Nelson, “Migration, Real Income and Information,” Journal of Regional Science, 1 (Spring 1959), 43-74;
19. Michael J. Greenwood, “Lagged Response in the Decision to Migrate,” Journal of Regional Science, 10 (Dec. 1970), 375-84; and
20. Mildred B. Levy and Walter J. Wadycki, “The Influence of Family and Friends on Geographic Labor Mobility: An International Comparison,” Review of Economics and Statistics 55, (May 1973), 198-203. The measure of family and friends, 1900 migrant stock, used in this study was in part generated by the 1898 flow, the dependent variable. The resultant misspecification, however, was not found to be serious. This problem is discussed in
21. James A. Dunlevy and Henry A. Gemery, “The Role of Migrant Stock and Lagged Migration in the Settlement Patterns of Nineteenth Century Immigrants,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 59 (May 1977), 137-44.
22. The South dummy variable was not transformed to its logarithm. A discussion of the Zellner technique is found in Arnold Zellner, “An Efficient Method of Estimating Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Tests for Aggregation Bias,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 57 (June 1962), 348-68.
23. A similar conclusion based on a different methodology was drawn by Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder, “The Increasing Urbanization Thesis—Did ‘New Immigrants' to the United States have a Particular Fondness for Urban Life? Explorations in Economic History, 8 (Spring 1971), 305-19. Further consideration of the similarity of response of the new and old immigrant nativities to this and other variables appears later in the text.
24. These F-statistics are the squares of the more commonly used t-statistics associated with tests of equality between two random variables. Since the weights are the ex post relative numbers of immigrants, they are non-stochastic. The test is therefore that described by Henri Theil, Principles of Econometrics (New York, 1971), p. 313.
25. Gallaway and Vedder, “The Increasing Urbanization Thesis….”