Abstract
This paper derives original series of average years of schooling in the United States 1870–1930, which take into account the impact of mass migrations on the US educational level. We reconstruct the foreign-born US population by age and by country of origin, while combining data on the flow of migrants by country and the age pyramids of migrants by country. Then, we use original data on educational attainment in the nineteenth century presented in Morrisson and Murtin (J Human Cap, in press) in order to estimate the educational level of US immigrants by age and by country. As a result, our series are consistent with the first national estimates of average schooling in 1940. We show that mass migrations have had a significant but modest impact on the US average educational attainment. However, the educational gap between US natives and immigrants was large and increased with the second immigration wave, a phenomenon that most likely fostered the implementation of restrictive immigration rules in the 1920s.
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Notes
Data are taken from the Historical Statistics of the United States (2009), quoted hereafter as HSUS. Until 1930, a large majority of the arrivals of alien passengers corresponds to the arrivals of US immigrants.
As explained by Morrisson and Murtin (2009), average years of schooling are robust to underlying durations.
Only the 0–15 population resulting from pre-1820 migrations could have an influence in 1870. It will anyhow be very modest due to low life expectancy, the low share of children among immigrants at that date, and small flows of migrants relatively to those of the future decades.
Hatton and Williamson (1998, p. 254, footnote 6) suggest that temporary migration started expanding in the late nineteenth century as a result of the decrease in transportation costs. Specifically, the authors report that between 1890 and 1914 return migration was 30 percent of the gross inflow, being more important for Southern Europeans than for the Irish, Russians and Scandinavians and suggest that these high return rates where the basis for what gradually became temporary migrations (Hatton and Williamson 1998, p. 9), which have no impact on our estimates.
We thank an anonymous referee for pointing at this issue.
For the flow of immigration we used the net flow of immigrants as calculated by the US Census (HSUS Table Aa9-14), which is based on Kuznets-Rubin from 1870 (HSUS Table Ad21-24); for countries shares, we used data on immigrants by last country of residence (HSUS Table Ad106-120) to proxy the origin country, as those series are the only one to go back in time as far as 1820; foreign-born population by country of birth are taken from HSUS Table Ad354-443; US immigrants by age are taken from Table Ad226-230 (HSUS) where age groups have been homogeneized across time and statistics have been smoothed with a 10 years moving average; age pyramids of immigrants from other countries are taken from Ferenczi and Willcox (1929a), where age groups have been homogeneized.
Post-1918 borders were retained for all countries. In flows of migrants and foreign-born populations, Austria–Hungary also included Czechoslovaquia, Albania and Yugoslavia; France included Belgium and Netherlands; Italy included Greece, Portugal and Spain; Mexico included Latin American countries and Caraibes; Russia–Finland included Bulgaria, Baltic countries, Romania and Turkey; Denmark was added to Sweden–Norway. Corresponding figures for education are population weighted averages. The names of the groups derive from the major emigration countries among them.
Fogel (1994) observed a decline in life expectancy between 1800 and 1860 and after a gradual increase by considering the overall population.
Many factors seem to have played a role. First, the rapid mortality decline can be explained by advances in living standards and better living conditions, improvements in the germ theory of disease and certainly in the treatment of early-life disease. According to Nugent (1992, p. 23) quoting a case study of Philadelphia over 1870–1930, epidemic diseases like smallpox, scarlet fever and typhoid fever were no longer causes of death.
More detailed information is provided for immigrants from Britain, Germany and Ireland who represented the bulk of European immigration over the period considered.
Passenger Lists began in 1819 and were filed by the captain of the ship at the arrival in New York City. Each ship record includes information on passengers’ name, gender, age, country of origin and occupation. In spite of some limitations discussed in Cohn (1995) they represent a valuable source of information.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to compare the share of industry and services as classification turned out to be inconsistent between our two data sources: Ferenczi and Willcox (1929a, b) for migrants, Mitchell (2003a, b) for national figures. Mitchell acknowledges in preambule that the building of such classification was difficult. He relies on the work of Bairoch et al. (1968), who wrote: “because of the frequent changes in criteria and methods used in census taking...it is practically impossible to come up with statistics that are perfectly comparable in time and space”.
Low-developed countries have been high purveyor of immigrants; on the same time, within those countries, Hatton and Williamson (1998, p. 11) describe how over time immigrants’ background shifted from farmers and artisans to workers with rural roots but nonagricultural occupations.
An examination of enrolment series for 74 countries demonstrate that growth in the enrolment rate has been a common rule in any continent at any time, with a few exceptions occurring during wars and the Great Depression.
More precisely, we interpolated the flow of migrants from Poland between 1894 and 1920 as it was missing in the data. Foreign-born population from Austria–Hungary turned out to be largely overestimated with very high flows of migrants between 1874 and 1894; we applied an ad hoc statistical correction, lessening those flows by 30%, which fit the corresponding foreign-born population; Mexican immigration is known to be under-reported (see notes of HSUS Table Ad1-2) with a share of US immigration smaller than 0.5% between 1835 and 1910; we interpolated this share over the latter period, augmenting it at about 2%. The UK had only sparse data (the share of children 0–14); so we assumed that its age pyramid was intermediary between that of Germany, where the share of children is high, and Ireland, where the latter share is low, reflecting a blend of familial and economic migrations. Canada was input the average US age pyramid. Data on Italy were sparse between 1870 and 1920 and were unable to account for the prewar peak in adult migration; consequently it was inputed the Finish age pyramid that was roughly compatible during this period, as witnessed by the share of 0–14 children in 1900 and 1910.
Unfortunately, migration data from the US Bureau were not at our disposal after 1930 and we were unable to extrapolate our estimates in 1940 and beyond for a full comparison. However, as stocks of average schooling have a strong trend component, we believe that this finding is already enlightning.
In this regard, statistics are not consistently recorded across states (e.g., in some states enrollment rates have been recorded only for some age-groups, some education data series follow the school rather than the calendar year...) and more in general these education data do not show the “years of schooling” of the population and appear inflated when comparing these to the actual occupations.
Also, the state of South Dakota adopted the same model to record the educational level of the population.
With the exception of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which imposed restrictions on immigration from Asia. According to Foreman-Peck (1992), this restriction was motivated by the fact that workers from Asia were mainly unskilled and would have substituted the American labor force rather than complementing domestic labor.
Goldin (1994) explains how calls for the literacy test were given serious consideration much earlier than the text became law in 1917. In fact, as early as in 1897 the proposal passed the House and the Senate but received a presidential veto.
It may also create higher inequality at the bottom of the income distribution. As regards the latter argument, Timmer and Williamson (1997, p. 24) decompose the sources of the adoption of more restrictive immigration policy and find that the decline in relative income of the unskilled explain 63.4 of the change over 1861–1885 but only 13.9 over 1885–1917. This reveals that other non-market factors may have played a significant role in determining the passage of more stringent immigration laws in the early twentieth century.
According to Claxton (1920, p. 622) “Americanization [wa]s a process of education, of winning the mind and heart through instruction and enlightenment” and according to Thompson (1920, p. 582), “America [wa]s looking forward with anxious hope to the school as the chief instrument for Americanization”.
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Acknowledgment
Viarengo gratefully acknowledges the support received from the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.
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This paper has benefited from useful insights by Avner Greif, Claude Diebolt, Claudia Goldin, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, Christian Morrisson, Hugh Rockoff, Gianni Toniolo, Jeffrey Williamson, Gavin Wright, as well as seminar participants at Rutgers University, Stanford University and Tor Vergata University. Murtin acknowledges financial support from the Mellon Foundation when he was hosted by Stanford Centre for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, as well as from the EU RTN Migration network when he was hosted by Tor Vergata University, Roma.
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Murtin, F., Viarengo, M. American education in the age of mass migrations 1870–1930. Cliometrica 4, 113–139 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0043-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0043-2