Immigrants and the Making of America

By Sandra Sequeira, Nathan Nunn, Nancy Qian. The Review of Economic Studies, 2019

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effects of European immigration to the U.S. during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920) on economic prosperity. Exploiting cross-county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network, we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment today. The long-run effects seem to capture the persistence of short-run benefits, including greater industrialization, increased agricultural productivity, and more innovation.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86c6e1ba196f67904cc7f7fd009f86a0aa4e33b6

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Citations in the corpus

Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2019, unknown): “As documented in Sequeira et al. (2019), the gradual expansion of the railroad network during the second half of the nineteenth century is a strong predictor of the geographic distribution of immigrants in the US: places that gained access”
Immigration and preferences for redistribution in Europe1 (2019, background): “While population diversity may have important economic benefits in the long run (Ortega and Peri, 2014; Alesina et al., 2016; Sequeira et al., 2019; Tabellini, 2018), in the short-run immigration and diversity are perceived by many as a threat to social cohesion and as putting welfare systems at ris”