Abstract
Emigrants from Italy and Ireland contributed disproportionately to the age of mass migration. That their departure improved the living standards of those they left behind is hardly in doubt. Nevertheless, a voluminous literature on the selectivity of migrant flows—from both sending and receiving country perspectives—has given rise to claims that migration generates both “brain drains” and “brain gains.” On the one hand, positive or negative selection among emigrants may affect the level of human capital in sending countries. On the other hand, the prospect of emigration and return migration may both spur investment in schooling in source countries. This essay describes the history of emigration from Italy and Ireland during the age of mass migration from these perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
The number of studies on Italian emigration, in particular by Italian scholars, is endless. Just to refer to the more complete and exhaustive works: Rosoli (1978), Sori (1979), Bevilacqua et al. (2002), Corti and Sanfilippo (2009). Rosoli and Ostuni (1978) present an extremely rich bibliographic essay that reports the sources of data on Italian emigration. International migration within Europe was also limited before the 1880s.
- 2.
The first mechanism emphasizes the fact that potential migrants base their decision to leave on the comparison between future expected incomes abroad and at home (among other push and pull factors). See Hatton for a survey on the cliometrics of international migration and Gomellini and Ó Gráda (2013) for a model of the determinants of emigration.
- 3.
Available official data on return migration (lacking until 1905) imply that the ratio of return to gross emigration cannot have exceeded half in the pre-1914 period. Compare Bandiera et al. (2013).
- 4.
The correlation across regions between the proportion of all emigrants returning in 1905–1920 and the proportion choosing the USA in 1876–1910 is 0.67.
- 5.
- 6.
Gomellini and Ó Gráda (2013) calculate Italy’s emigration-induced gains in the early twentieth century, via the reduction of labor oversupply and the resulting increase in real wages. These gains persist also under the hypothesis of positive self-selection of emigrants. On Ireland, see Ó Gráda and Walsh (1994).
- 7.
Theoretically and from the point of view of the source country, if return to education is greater in the latter than in the host country, then negative selection might be the result; vice versa, the greater the return-to-skill gap between sending and receiving economies, the more likely is the hypothesis that the more skilled will leave. Economic theory suggests, moreover, that the higher the fixed costs of migration the more plausible the hypothesis of a selective migration because skilled individuals will be able to amortize costs more quickly. In the age of mass migration, the cost of voyage from Italy to USA, including the cost of reaching the port of embarkation, was affordable, though not negligible. See Commissariato Generale dell’ Emigrazione (1926), Gomellini and Ó Gráda (2013) for a more detailed analysis.
- 8.
In Italy, the first laws on migration issued by the government of the Kingdom aimed at severely limiting departures (The Menabrea Law, 1868; The Lanza Law, 1873). These limitations were supported by the concerns of industrialists in the north and of landowners in the south: Significant emigration would increase real wages. Other restrictions were introduced later to avoid emigration as a means of escaping the conscription introduced immediately after unification (The Crispi Law, 1988). It was only with the 1901 law, backed by Luttazzi and Pantano (two Italian politicians), that emigration became finally a free choice of the individual. See Einaudi (2007) for more details.
- 9.
Francesco Coletti (1866–1940) was an Italian statistician and economist. The quotations that follow are in his 1911 publication, from page 147 onward.
- 10.
Cesare Jarach, a statistician, was commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Business, to carry on an inquiry into the economic conditions of the Abruzzi, one of the Italian regions.
- 11.
In this statement, Coletti clearly does not take fully into account other possible institutional and supply-side factors that most likely affected the enrollment rates. Nonetheless, Giffoni and Gomellini (2015: 12), who control for supply-side factors in their estimates argue that pre-1911 institutional changes as school reforms had little or no effects in fostering attendance rates. Bertola and Sestito (2013) have recently studied the topic in detail. Although various laws reformed the system in this period, all in all, the final judgment on the reforms implemented in the first five decades after Italy unification is pretty clear: Due to a range of factors, they had little or no impact on primary school attendance rates. In the same vein, more recently, Cappelli and Vasta (2019: 23), who study the post-1911 effect of the Daneo-Credaro reform which centralized primary education. They state that between Italy’s unification in 1861 and 1911, “the 50-year persistence of decentralized primary schooling hampered the accumulation of human capital and regional convergence in basic education.”
- 12.
Clearly, the effect of returnees on the sending country depends also on the investments they implement in the native country and on the amount of savings accumulated abroad. For example, Cerase (1967), in his research on returns from the USA, shows a discouraging scenario in the South. He finds out that 19 percent returned because their migratory project failed, 40 percent because their savings plans were reached, 26 percent for retirement and only 16 percent to invest in the area of origin. See Del Boca and Venturini (2003) and Bevilacqua et al. (2001).
- 13.
The choice to sample more important municipalities was taken to guarantee the comparability among the Italian cities (and thus minimizes measurement errors).
- 14.
A necessary step when dealing with the education system would be to examine how it is structured. In Giffoni and Gomellini (2015), the authors analyze the structure and the evolution of Italy’s education system between 1861 and 1913.
- 15.
For further detail, see the Annuario Statistico delle Città Italiane, from 1906 to 1914 and Villani (2011).
- 16.
In more technical terms, we found evidence of a positive relationship between the emigration rate and the attendance rate for public primary schools: A 10 log point increase in the outflows (inflows) is associated with a 0.19 (0.37) log point increase in the attendance rate (the estimated association remains robust also adding a complete set of interaction terms between geographical dummy variables at macro-area level and time dummy variables). As far as evening school enrollment rate is concerned, the elasticity of the enrollment rate with respect to emigration (returnees) is 0.161 (0.300): weak evidence, perhaps, for the view that migration would have spurred adult education. Finally, many scholars emphasized the influence of remittances in alleviating the budget constraint that prevents people from investing in education. We tested this hypothesis, and we found that a 10 percent increase in remittances is associated with a 0.48 and a 0.38 percent increase in the attendance rate. In an exercise described in detail elsewhere (Giffoni and Gomellini 2015), we address potential concerns about reverse causality, omitted variables and measurement error biases by running instrumental variable (IV) regressions where IV is the combination of average costs of a third class rail travel from city i to the nearest embarkation port, and the averaged steerage cost from port k to the destination.
- 17.
Note, however, that the authorities in Massachusetts deported a small number of the most destitute among them (Hirota 2017).
- 18.
Even today these are high percentages by international standards: see World Bank, “Personal remittances, received (%of GDP),” available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS.
- 19.
For more on the codes, see https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/group/occ.
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Gomellini, M., Ó Gráda, C. (2019). Brain Drain and Brain Gain in Italy and Ireland in the Age of Mass Migration. In: Mitch, D., Cappelli, G. (eds) Globalization and the Rise of Mass Education. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25417-9_6
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