Brains Versus Brawn: The Persistence and Convergence of Premigration Socioeconomic Status During the Age of Mass Migration

Peter Catron , University of Washington, Seattle

Immigrant assimilation studies often point to the success of immigrants who entered in the first half of the twentieth century to draw inferences about whether today’s immigrants will follow a similar trajectory. However, there is disagreement over how long premigration differences take to disappear with some researchers arguing that convergence takes up to 150 years, and others arguing that convergence happens over a few generations. This research, however, has been unable to link immigrants to their descendants and instead rely on pseudo-cohort analyses. To adjudicate the speed of premigration convergence, I build a new panel dataset that links immigrants from their passenger record to their census record and then follows their children across time. The results suggest that while premigration differences matter when predicting the economic outcomes of the first generation, their effects are severely attenuated by the second and third generations.

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 Presented in Session 225. International Migration