Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T04:17:45.839Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Cream of the Crop? Geography, Networks, and Irish Migrant Selection in the Age of Mass Migration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2019

Dylan Shane Connor
Dylan Shane Connor*
Affiliation:
Dylan Shane Connor is an Assistant Professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, 975 S Myrtle Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85281. E-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

With more than 30 million people moving to North America during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), governments feared that Europe was losing its most talented workers. Using new data from Ireland in the early twentieth century, I provide evidence to the contrary, showing that the sons of farmers and illiterate men were more likely to emigrate than their literate and skilled counterparts. Emigration rates were highest in poorer farming communities with stronger migrant networks. I constructed these data using new name-based techniques to follow people over time and to measure chain migration from origin communities to the United States.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 139 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

For their guidance and assistance with this work, I want to express my most sincere thanks to Ann Carlos and Bill Collins (editors), two anonymous reviewers, Leah Boustan, Cormac Ó Gráda, Dora Costa, Jamie Goodwin-White, David Rigby, Michael Storper, Alan Fernihough, Roger Waldinger, Peter Catron, Joe Ferrie, Francisco Haimovich, Katherine Eriksson, Gerald Mills, Niamh Moore, Eoin McLoughlin, Enda Delaney, and participants at the 2015 annual meetings of the Population Association of America, the Social Science History Association and the Economic History Association, the All-UC Graduate Student Workshop in Economic History, the UCLA Proseminar in Economic History, and the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration. This research was supported by a Travelling Studentship from the National University of Ireland.

References

REFERENCES

Abramitzky, Ran, Boustan, Leah, and Eriksson, Katherine. “Europe’s Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration.” American Economic Review 102, no. 5 (2012): 1832–56.10.1257/aer.102.5.1832CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Abramitzky, Ran, Boustan, Leah, and Eriksson, Katherine. “Have the Poor Always Been Less Likely to Migrate? Evidence from Inheritance Practices During the Age of Mass Migration.” Journal of Development Economics 102 (2013): 2–14.10.1016/j.jdeveco.2012.08.004CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Abramitzky, Ran, Mill, Roy, and Pärez, Santiago. “Linking Individuals Across Historical Sources: A Fully Automated Approach.” NBER Working Paper No. 24324, Cambridge, MA, 2018.Google Scholar
Ager, Philipp, and Brückner, Markus. “Cultural Diversity and Economic Growth: Evidence from the US during the Age of Mass Migration.” European Economic Review 64 (2013): 76–97.10.1016/j.euroecorev.2013.07.011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Rohan, and Ward, Zachary. “Age at Arrival and Assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration.” Journal of Economic History 78, no. 3 (2018): 904–37.10.1017/S0022050718000335CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anbinder, Tyler, and McCaffrey, Hope. “Which Irish Men and Women Immigrated to the United States during the Great Famine Migration of 1846-54?” Irish Historical Studies 39, no. 156 (2015): 620–42.10.1017/ihs.2015.22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arensberg, Conrad Maynadier, and Kimball, Solon Toothaker. Family and Community in Ireland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940.Google Scholar
Bailey, Martha, Cole, Connor, Henderson, Morgan, et al. “How Well Do Automated Methods Perform in Historical Samples? Evidence from New Ground Truth.” NBER Working Paper No. 24019, Cambridge, MA, 2017.Google Scholar
Begley, Jason, Geary, Frank, and Stark, Tom. “Convergence in the Pre-1914 Atlantic Economy: What Really Happened to Wages in Ireland between 1881 and 1911?” Cambridge Journal of Economics 40, no. 1 (2016): 43–67.10.1093/cje/beu063CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belot, Michèle V. K., and Hatton, Timothy J.. “Immigrant Selection in the OECD.” Scandinavian Journal of Ec o nomics 114, no. 4 (2012): 1105–128.10.1111/j.1467-9442.2012.01721.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borchers, Allison, Ifft, Jennifer, and Kuethe, Todd. “Linking the Price of Agricultural Land to Use Values and Amenities.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 96, no. 5 (2014): 1307–20.10.1093/ajae/aau041CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borjas, George J. “Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants.” American Economic Review 77, no. 4 (1987): 531–53.Google Scholar
Borjas, George J. “Assimilation and Changes in Cohort Quality Revisited: What Happened to Immigrant Earnings in the 1980s?” NBER Working Paper No. 4866, Cambridge, MA, September 1994.Google Scholar
Borjas, George J. Immigration Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.10.4159/harvard.9780674369900CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boustan, Leah. 2016. Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boustan, Leah, and Abramitzky, Ran. “Immigration in American Economic History.” Journal of Economic Literature 44, no. 4 (2017): 1311–45.Google Scholar
Boyer, George R., Hatton, Timothy J., and O’Rourke, Kevin. “The Impact of Emigration on Real Wages in Ireland, 1850–1914.” In Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850–1939, edited by Hatton, T. J. and Williamson, J. G., 221–39. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Breathnach, Ciara. The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891-1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland. Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Burt, Oscar R. “Econometric Modeling of the Capitalization Formula for Farmland Prices.” American Journal of A g ricultural Economics 68, no. 1 (1986): 10–26.10.2307/1241645CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, C. F., Duncan, G. A., Nevin, Donal, and O Buachalla, Liam. “Symposium on the Report of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems.” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland XIX (1956): 104–21.Google Scholar
Casey, Marion, and Lee, J. J.. Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States. New York: NYU Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Catron, Peter. “The Citizenship Advantage: Immigrant Socioeconomic Attainment across Generations in the Age of Mass Migration.” UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration Working Paper, Los Angeles, CA, 2017.Google Scholar
Collins, William J., and Wanamaker, Marianne H.. “Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 6, no. 1 (2014): 220–52.Google Scholar
Collins, William J., and Wanamaker, Marianne H.. “The Great Migration in Black and White: New Evidence on the Selection and Sorting of Southern Mi Crossman grants.” Journal of Economic History 75, no. 4 (2015): 947–92.10.1017/S0022050715001527CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connor, D. S. Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility: A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants. International Migration Review, 2018a. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918318806891.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connor, D. S. Replication for “The Cream of the Crop? Geography Networks and Irish migrant Selection.” Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2018b-11-30. https://doi.org/10.3886/E107544V1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connor, D. S. “Poverty, Religious Differences and Child Mortality in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of Dublin.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 3 (2017): 625–46.10.1080/24694452.2016.1261682CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connor, Dylan Shane, Gerald, Mills, and Moore-Cherry, Niamh. “The 1911 Census and Dublin City: A Spatial Analysis.” Irish Geography 44, no. 2–3 (2011): 245–63.10.1080/00750778.2012.657950CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crossman, Virginia. Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland 1850-1914. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Ell, P., Gregory, I. Irish Poor Law Union and Barony Boundaries, 1841-1871. [data collection]. UK Data Service. SN: 4999, 2004.Google Scholar
Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers On Ireland (EPPI). “Emigration Statistics of Ireland for the Year 1902.” Dublin: Cahill & Company, 1903. Cd. 1489. Available at http://www.dippam.ac.uk/eppi/documents/20492/page/566483.Google Scholar
Featherstone, Allen M., and Baker, Timothy G.. “An Examination of Farm Sector Real Asset Dynamics: 1910–85.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 69, no. 3 (1987): 532–46.10.2307/1241689CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feigenbaum, James J. “Automated Census Record Linking: A Machine Learning Approach.” Unpublished manuscript, 2016a. Available at https://jamesfeigenbaum.github.io/research/pdf/census-link-ml.pdf.Google Scholar
Feigenbaum, James J. “JAROWINKLER: Stata Module to Calculate the Jaro-Winkler Distance between Strings.” Statistical Software Components, 2016b.Google Scholar
Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Jesús. “New Evidence on Emigrant Selection.” Review of Economics and Statistics 93, no. 1 (2011): 72–96.10.1162/REST_a_00050CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernihough, Alan. “Human Capital and the Quantity–Quality Trade-off During the Demographic Transition.” Journal of Economic Growth 22, no. 1 (2017): 35–65.10.1007/s10887-016-9138-3CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernihough, Alan, Ó Gráda, Cormac, and Walsh, Brendan M.. “Intermarriage in a Divided Society: Ireland a Century Ago.” Explorations in Economic History 56 (2015): 1–14.10.1016/j.eeh.2014.11.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferrie, Joseph P. “The Wealth Accumulation of Antebellum European Immigrants to the US, 1840–60.” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 1 (1994): 1–33.10.1017/S0022050700013978CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferrie, Joseph P. “A New Sample of Males Linked from the Public Use Microdata Sample of the 1850 US Federal Census of Population to the 1860 US Federal Census Manuscript Schedules.” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (1996): 141–56.10.1080/01615440.1996.10112735CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, David. “Irish Emigration in the Later Nineteenth Century.” Irish Historical Studies 22, no. 86 (1980): 126–43.10.1017/S0021121400026158CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, David. Irish Emigration 1801–1921. Vol. 1. Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1984.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, David. Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Gelbach, Jonah B. “When Do Covariates Matter? And Which Ones, and How Much?” Journal of Labor Economics 34, no. 2 (2016): 509–43.10.1086/683668CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grogger, Jeffrey, and Hanson, Gordon H.. “Income Maximization and the Selection and Sorting of International Migrants.” Journal of Development Economics, Symposium on Globalization and Brain Drain, 95, no. 1 (2011): 42–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2010.06.003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guinnane, Timothy. The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Harkness, D. A. “Irish Emigration.” In International Migrations, Volume II: Interpretations, edited by Willcox, Walter F., 261–282. Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1931.Google Scholar
Hatton, Timothy J., and Williamson, Jeffrey G.. “After the Famine: Emigration from Ireland, 1850–1913.” Journal of Economic History 53, no. 3 (1993): 575–600.10.1017/S0022050700013498CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Oxon: Routledge, 2014.10.4324/9781315842530CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kosack, Edward, and Ward, Zachary. “Who Crossed the Border? Self-Selection of Mexican Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century.” Journal of Economic History 74, no. 4 (2014): 1015–44.10.1017/S0022050714000849CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeuwen, Marco van, and Maas, Ineke. HISCLASS: A Historical International Social Class Scheme. Leuven, Belgium: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2011.Google Scholar
Massey, Catherine G. “Playing with Matches: An Assessment of Accuracy in Linked Historical Data.” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, (2017): 1–15.Google Scholar
Matheson, Robert. Special Report on Surnames in Ireland: Together with Varieties and Synonymes of Surnames and Christian Names in Ireland. Dublin: H.M. Stationery Office, 1901.Google Scholar
Matheson, Robert. “A Review of the General Topographical Index of Ireland 1901.” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland XII, no. LXXXIX (1908): 263–94.Google Scholar
McKenzie, David, and Rapoport, Hillel. “Self-Selection Patterns in Mexico-US Migration: The Role of Migration Networks.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92, no. 4 (2010): 811–21.10.1162/REST_a_00032CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meagher, Timothy J. “From the World to the Village and the Beginning to the End and after: Research Opportunities in Irish American History.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (2009): 118–35.Google Scholar
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Mokyr, Joel, and Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Emigration and Poverty in Prefamine Ireland.” Explorations in Economic Hi s tory 19, no. 4 (1982): 360–84.10.1016/0014-4983(82)90008-0CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moulton, Brent R. 1990. “An Illustration of a Pitfall in Estimating the Effects of Aggregate Variables on Micro Units.” Review of Economics and Statistics 72, no. 2 (1990): 334–38.10.2307/2109724CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munshi, Kaivan. “Networks in the Modern Economy: Mexican Migrants in the US Labor Market.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 2 (2003): 549–99.10.1162/003355303321675455CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ó Gráda, Cormac. “A Note on Nineteenth-Century Irish Emigration Statistics.” Population Studies 29, no. 1 (1975): 143–49.10.1080/00324728.1975.10410191CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Primogeniture and Ultimogeniture in Rural Ireland.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, no. 3 (1980): 491–97.10.2307/203190CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ó Gráda, Cormac. “The 1901 and 1911 Irish Censuses: A Unique Source for the Historian.” Ottawa, ON: Library and Archives Canada, 2006. Available at https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/033001/f2/033001-1402.1-e.pdf.Google Scholar
O’Malley, Eoin. “The Decline of Irish Industry in the Nineteenth Century.” Economic and Social Review 13, no. 1 (1981): 21–42.Google Scholar
O’Rourke, Kevin. “Emigration and Living Standards in Ireland since the Famine.” Journal of Population Economics 8, no. 4 (1995): 407–21.Google ScholarPubMed
O’Rourke, Kevin, and Williamson, Jeffrey G.. “Around the European Periphery 1870–1913: Globalization, Schooling and Growth.” European Review of Economic History 1, no. 2 (1997): 153–90.10.1017/S1361491697000087CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodrúguez-Pose, Andräs, and von Berlepsch, Viola. “When Migrants Rule: The Legacy of Mass Migration on Economic Development in the United States.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 3 (2014): 628–51.10.1080/00045608.2014.892381CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Andrew Donald. “Some Thoughts on the Distribution of Earnings.” Oxford Economic Papers 3, no. 2 (1951): 135–46.10.1093/oxfordjournals.oep.a041827CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Royal Commission on Labour. The Agricultural Labourer, Assistant Commissioners’ Reports on the Agricultural Labourer. Vol. IV. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1893.Google Scholar
Ruggles, Steven, Fitch, Catherine, and Roberts, Evan. “Historical Census Record Linkage.” Minnesota Population Center Working Paper No. 2017-3, Minnesota, MN, December 2017.Google Scholar
Ruggles, Steven, Genadek, Katie, Goeken, Ronald, Grover, Josiah, and Sobek, Matthew. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 7.0 [Machine-Readable Database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V7.0.Google Scholar
Spitzer, Yannay, and Zimran, Ariell. “Migrant Self-Selection: Anthropometric Evidence from the Mass Migration of Italians to the United States 1907-1925.” Journal of Development Economics 134 (2018): 226–47.10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.04.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Michael. After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Ward, Zachary. “Have Language Skills Always Been So Valuable? The Low Return to English Fluency During the Age of Mass Migration.” Unpublished manuscript, 2018. Available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B77COWld2HzSMVJvdjI5MmRiajA/view.Google Scholar
Wegge, Simone A. “Chain Migration and Information Networks: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel.” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 4 (1998): 957–86.10.1017/S0022050700021689CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wegge, Simone A. “Network Strategies of Nineteenth Century Hesse-Cassel Emigrants.” History of the Family 13, no. 3 (2008): 296–314.10.1016/j.hisfam.2008.08.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wegge, Simone A., Anbinder, Tyler, and Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Immigrants and Savers: A Rich New Database on the Irish in 1850s New York.” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 50, no. 3 (2017): 144–55.10.1080/01615440.2017.1319773CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolf, Nicholas M. An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Connor supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Connor supplementary material(File)
File 1.5 MB