Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T15:18:54.783Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2019

Katherine Eriksson
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of California-Davis, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616, Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, and Research Associate at LEAP, Stellenbosch University. E-mail: [email protected].
Zachary Ward
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Baylor University, 1621 S 3rd Street, Waco, TX, 76798. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract

We provide the first estimates of immigrant residential segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan–Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition to providing a consistent measure of segregation, we also document new patterns such as high levels of segregation in rural areas, in small factory towns and for non-European sources. Early twentieth-century immigrants spatially assimilated at a slow rate, leaving immigrants’ lived experience distinct from natives for decades after arrival.

Type
Article
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

We thank William Collins, Tim Hatton, Laura Panza, John Parman, Allison Shertzer, Dafeng Xu, and anonymous referees for helpful comments. We thank those at the University of Minnesota Population Center and Ancestry.com for access to historical census files.

References

REFERENCES

Abramitzky, Ran, Boustan, Leah Platt, and Eriksson, Katherine. “A Nation of Immigrants: Assimilation and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration.Journal of Political Economy 122, no. 3 (2014): 467506.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Abramitzky, Ran, Boustan, Leah Platt, and Eriksson, Katherine. “Cultural Assimilation During the Age of Mass Migration.” NBER Working Paper No. 22381, Cambridge, MA, July 2016.Google Scholar
Agresti, Barbara F.Measuring Residential Segregation: In Nineteenth-Century American Cities.Sociological Methods & Research 8, no. 4 (1980): 389–99.CrossRefGoogle 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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alba, Richard D. Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985.Google Scholar
Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001.Google Scholar
Andrews, Rodney, Casey, Marcus, Hardy, Bradley L., and Logan, Trevon D.. “Location Matters: Historical Racial Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility.Economics Letters 158 (2017): 6772.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aslund, Olof, Edin, Per-Anders, Fredriksson, Peter, and Gronqvist, Hans. “Peers, Neighborhoods, and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy.American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3 (2011): 6795.Google Scholar
Bandiera, Oriana, Rasul, Imran, and Viarengo, Martina. “The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration.Journal of Development Economics 102 (2013): 2347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Martha, Cole, Connor, Henderson, Morgan, and Massey, Catherine. “How Well Do Automated Methods Perform in Historical Samples? Evidence from New Ground Truth.” NBER Working Paper No. 24019, Cambridge, MA, November 2017.Google Scholar
Biavaschi, Costanza, Giulietti, Corrado, and Siddique, Zahra. “The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization.Journal of Labor Economics 35, no. 4 (2017): 1089–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borjas, George. “Ethnicity, Neighborhoods, and Human-Capital Externalities.American Economic Review 985, no. 3 (1995): 365–90.Google Scholar
Burgess, Ernest W.Residential Segregation in American Cities.The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 140, no. 1 (1928): 105–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carneiro, Pedro Manuel, Lee, Sokbae, and Reis, Hugo. “Please Call Me John: Name Choice and the Assimilation of Immigrants in the United States, 1900–1930.Mimeo, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, Susan. “Embracing Isolation: Chinese American Migration to Small-Town America, 1882–1943.Mimeo, 2012.Google Scholar
Cook, Lisa D., Logan, Trevon D., and Parman, John M.. “Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching.Social Science History 42, no. 4 (2018): 635–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, David M., Glaeser, Edward L., and Vigdor, Jacob L.. “The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto.Journal of Political Economy 107, no. 3 (1999): 455506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, David M., Glaeser, Edward L., and Vigdor, Jacob L.. “Is the Melting Pot Still Hot? Explaining the Resurgence of Immigrant Segregation.Review of Economics and Statistics 90, no. 3 (2008): 478–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, Otis Dudley, and Lieberson, Stanley. “Ethnic Segregation and Assimilation.American Journal of Sociology 64, no. 4 (1959): 364–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, Katherine. “Ethnic Enclaves and Immigrant Outcomes: Norwegian Immigrants During the Age of Mass Migration.” NBER Working Paper No. 24763, Cambridge, MA, June 2018.Google Scholar
Eriksson, Katherine, and Ward, Zachary. “The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940.” Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-05-13. http://doi.org/10.3886/E109662V2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feigenbaum, James J.Automated Census Record Linking: A Machine Learning Approach.Mimeo, 2016.Google Scholar
Gould, John D.European Inter-Continental Emigration. The Road Home: Return Migration from the USA.Journal of European Economic History 9, no. 1 (1980): 41112.Google Scholar
Grigoryeva, Angelina, and Ruef, Martin. “The Historical Demography of Racial Segregation.American Sociological Review 80, no. 4 (2015): 814–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacker, J. David. “New Estimates of Census Coverage in the United States, 1850–1930.Social Science History 37, no. 1 (2013): 71101.Google Scholar
Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880: A Study in Acculturation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Hershberg, Theodore. “The Philadelphia Social History Project: An Introduction.Historical Methods Newsletter 9, no. 2–3 (1976): 4358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hershberg, Theodore, Burstein, Alan N., Ericksen, Eugene P., Greenberg, Stephanie, and Yancey, William L.. “A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks, Immigrants and Opportunity in Philadelphia, 1850–1880, 1930, 1970.” In Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century: Essays Toward an Interdisciplinary History of the City, edited by Hershberg, Theodore, 461–91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Horan, Patrick M., and Hargis, Peggy G.. County Longitudinal Template, 1840–1990. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1995–12–20. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06576.v1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenks, Jeremiah Whipple, and Lauck, William Jett. The Immigration Problem. New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1911.Google Scholar
Kantrowitz, Nathan. “Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in Boston 1830–1970.The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 441, no. 1 (1979): 4154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberson, Stanley. Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. New York, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963.Google Scholar
Lieberson, Stanley. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Logan, John R., and Martinez, Matthew J.. “The Spatial Scale and Spatial Configuration of Residential Settlement: Measuring Segregation in the Postbellum South.American Journal of Sociology 123, no. 4 (2018): 1161–203.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Logan, John R., and Shin, Hyoung-jin. “Birds of a Feather: Social Bases of Neighborhood Formation in Newark, New Jersey, 1880.” Demography 53, no. 4 (2016): 1085–108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Logan, John R., and Zhang, Weiwei. “White Ethnic Residential Segregation in Historical Perspective: U.S. Cities in 1880.Social Science Research 41, no. 5 (2012): 1292–306.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Logan, Trevon D., and Parman, John M.. “The National Rise in Residential Segregation.Journal of Economic History 77, no. 1 (2017a): 127–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logan, Trevon D., and Parman, John M.. “Segregation and Homeownership in the Early Twentieth Century.American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 107, no. 5 (2017b): 410–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logan, Trevon D., and Parman, John M.. “Segregation and Mortality over Time and Space.Social Science & Medicine 199 (2018): 7786.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A.. “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.Social Forces 67, no. 2 (1988): 281315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, Robert E., and Burgess, Ernest W.. The City. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1925.Google Scholar
Ruggles, Steven, Genadek, Katie, Goeken, Ronald, Grover, Josiah, and Sobek, Matthew. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 8.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2018. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V8.0.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shertzer, Allison, Walsh, Randall P., and Logan, John R.. “Segregation and Neighborhood Change in Northern Cities: New Historical GIS Data from 1900–1930.Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 49, no. 4 (2016): 187–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spielman, Seth E., and Logan, John R.. “Using High-Resolution Population Data to Identify Neighborhoods and Establish Their Boundaries.Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 1 (2013): 6784.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thernstrom, Stephan. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vigdor, Jacob L. From Immigrants to Americans: The Rise and Fall of Fitting In. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.Google Scholar
United States Immigration Commission. Reports of the United States Immigration Commission. 61st Congress, 3rd session. Washington, DC: GPO, 1911.Google Scholar
Ward, Zachary. “Birds of Passage: Return Migration, Self-Selection and Immigration Quotas.Explorations in Economic History 64 (2017): 3752.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Zachary. “The Low Return to English Fluency During the Age of Mass Migration.” European Review of Economic History forthcoming, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wildsmith, Elizabeth, Gutmann, Myron P., and Gratton, Brian. “Assimilation and Intermarriage for U.S. Immigrant Groups, 1880–1990.The History of the Family 8, no. 4 (2003): 563–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Michael J., Dymowski, Robert F., and Wang, Shilian. “Ethnic Neighbors and Ethnic Myths: An Examination of Residential Segregation in 1910.” After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (1994): 175208.Google Scholar
Zunz, Olivier. The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Eriksson and Ward supplementary material

Eriksson and Ward supplementary material

Download Eriksson and Ward supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 1.2 MB