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Race, Skills, and Earnings: American Immigrants in 1909

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

On December 5, 1910, the Immigration Commission presented its voluminous report to the Congress. Though the report covered a multitude of topics, a central theme was that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were earning less than the “old” immigrants from northwestern Europe because the newcomers were willing to accept a lower standard of living. “They were,” the commission concluded, “content to accept wages and conditions which the native American and immigrants of the older class had come to regard as unsatisfactory.” The discovery of such “unfair competition,” along with its other findings, led the commission to recommend legislation restricting the admission of the “new” immigrant groups, and subsequently the immigration laws of 1917, 1921, and 1924 implemented this recommendation.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , June 1971 , pp. 420 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1971

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References

1 U.S. Immigration Commission, Report (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 42 volsGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., I, 38.

3 Hourwich, Isaac A., Immigration and Labor: The Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912), pp. 289, 312Google Scholar.

4 Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Florida, Alabama, Virginia, and West Virginia.

5 Bituminous coal mining; cotton goods in the North Atlantic states; iron and steel; slaughtering and meatpacking; clothing; glass; woolen and worsted goods; oil refining; copper mining and smelting; leather tanning, currying, and finishing; boots and shoes; silk goods; gloves; furniture; collars, cuffs, and shirts; sugar refining; ironore mining; cigars and tobacco; agricultural implements and vehicles; anthracite coal mining; carpets; cars; cutlery and tools; electrical supplies; electric railways; firearms; foundry and machine shop products; hosiery and knit goods; locomotives; paper and pulp; paper products; rope, twine, and hemp; sewing machines; steam railways; typewriters; zinc smelting and refining.

6 For a complete description of the study of employees in mining and manufacturing, see Immigration Commission, Report, XIX, 5–14, 43–47.

7 Hourwich, Immigration and Labor, pp. 48–60.

8 For the information schedule and accompanying instructions, see Immigration Commission, Report, II, 674, 711–13.

9 Hourwich, Immigration and Labor, pp. 55, 289.

10 Notably, the average weekly earnings of 6,604 native-born Negro workers, who were 76.4 percent literate and 100 percent English-speaking, was only $10.66, which falls $1.80 below the figure predicted on the basis of the relation between earnings and skills among immigrant groups as shown by equation (1). Before accepting this negative deviation as firm evidence of discrimination against Negroes, however, we might also recognize the substantially larger negative deviations in the cases of the Armenians (−$2.27), Greeks (−$2.12), and Syrians (−$2.50).

11 Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), pp. 121–23Google Scholar. Similar observations are scattered throughout the book. Again and again Riis maintained, “The whole matter resolves itself … into a question of education” (p. 147).

12 Hourwich, Immigration and Labor, p. 164. Compare Table 1.

13 Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), p. 195Google Scholar.