The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921

Claudia Goldin

No 4345, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Anti-immigrant forces almost succeeded in passing restrictive legislation in 1897, but their plan did not ultimately materialize for another twenty years. During that time 17 million Europeans from among the poorest nations came to the United States. This paper explores the economic and political forces that propped the door open for those twenty years, as well as the factors that eventually shut it Economic downturns and their consequent unemployment almost always brought demands for restriction. The flood of immigrants eventually did result in large negative effects on the wages of native-born workers. But the political clout of immigrants was strengthened by the reinforcing nature of their flows. Cities having large numbers of the foreign born received a disproportionate share of immigrants during the 1900 to 1910 period. After 1910, however, immigrant flows were diluting. This factor and the negative impact of immigrants on native wages were important in the passage of restrictionist legislation, although the rural heartland of America was pro-restriction from the l890s.

JEL-codes: J38 N31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993-04
Note: DAE LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as The Regulated Economy: An Historical Analysis of Political Economy, (University of Chicago Press) C. Goldin and G. Libecap, eds., 1994
Published as The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921 , Claudia Goldin . in The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy , Goldin and Libecap. 1994

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4345.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921 (1994)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4345

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4345

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().