What drives immigrant inequalities in career growth in the age of mass migration?

Dirk Witteveen and Mobarak Hossain

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article examines the association between modernization and career growth of American men and European immigrants, focusing on heterogeneity along ancestry, ethnicity, and early-career class position. Analyses rely on datasets built with individual-level linked historical Censuses (1901–1940), which longitudinally map socio-economic indices of full occupational careers of late-nineteenth-century population birth cohorts (1884–1891). Modernization is measured by time-variant and metropolitan area-specific indicators of key industries, employment chances, domestic migration, and urbanicity. Contradicting modernization theory and the logic of industrialism, results demonstrate that macroeconomic opportunity structures do not explain differences in career growth curves of first- and second-generation immigrants in comparison to White men with US-born parents. Instead, we argue that structural ethnic cleavages, in combination with early-career class allocation, account for most of the observed immigrant variation in intragenerational mobility. We also find that the career growth curves of second-generation immigrants from Ireland, the Nordic countries, and Russia, in particular, far exceed those of multi-generational American men, but only if they started their careers in the working-class rather than the agricultural sector.

JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2025-03-21
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Published in International Migration Review, 21, March, 2025. ISSN: 0197-9183

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