#DevTalks: Mobility and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration

Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, discusses her work, including her new book Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The discussion also addresses the prevailing narratives about the effects of migration and what that might suggest for policy design and debate.​​

Growth Lab research manager Nikita Taniparti moderated a discussion with Prof. Boustan on September 21, 2022 at Harvard Kennedy School.

Transcript

DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies. 

Nikita Taniparti: Today I am truly thrilled and excited to welcome our speaker, Professor Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Director of the Industrial Relations Section.

Her research lies with the intersection between economic history and labor economics and her first book, Competition of the Promised Land, Black Migrants and Northern Cities and Labor Markets, examined the impact of the great migration from the rural south of the United States during and after the World War II.

Her recent work including her new book, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success is co-authored by Ran Abramitzky and is on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Professor Boustan is also co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she also serves as the co-editor at the American Economic Journal of applied research.

She was named in Alfred P Sloan Research fellow in two thousand and twelve, and won the ICA Young Labor Economist award in two thousand and nineteen. And very recently she was also named fellow to the Econometric Society. Very importantly for us, we're welcoming her back to the Harvard campus, because it's also the one place that you called home when you were doing your PHD in economics here.

So we're going to start, we are presenting some context, setting data points to kind of get us on the same page. And then hopefully, we'll have a conversation with some questions from the audience as well. But we are over to you.

Professor Boustan: I'm really delighted to be able to share some of the findings from my new book Streets of Gold here at the Kennedy School, which, in addition to the Economics department, the Kennedy School is my Alma Mater. I was part of the inequality program here when I was in grad school, in two thousand and two and two thousand and three.

So I wrote this book with Ran, my long-time collaborator, and we were inspired to write the book, because we believe that national conversations about immigration and immigration reform are driven mostly by myths rather than my fact and data.

And so we set about to share some of our findings to be part of this conversation.

One of the myths inspired our title, Streets of Gold. This idea that anyone can come to the U.S. with just a few dollars in their pocket, and they can quickly make it here. But the truth is a lot more complex.

So I think it's well represented by this quotation. It's painted on the wall of the Ellis Island Muse, and it's attributed to unnamed Italian Congress, saying, "I came to America because I had heard that the streets were paved with gold. But when I got here I found out three things: First, the streets were not paved with gold; second, they weren't paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them."

So we ask ourselves, how would American history change if we listen to these millions of unsung migrants. Note that this was an unnamed background we never know is full story. So we use data on millions of such immigrant families, both in the past and today, to rebuild what we know about immigration from the ground up. That's our goal.

So where do these findings come from? In the historical case, we're using the U.S. Census records which become a following after seventy two years and has been fully digitized, and we can use these to follow an immigrant as he lands in the Us, and then spends more years in the country over the course of his career. We also can see children living at home with their parents and then follow that child into the labor market.

So you can think of us like curious grandchildren who are using ancestry.com, the genealogy website. And in fact, that's where we started with our work, and from there we build algorithms to follow more than just a few family members to really scale this up to thousands and then millions.

What I'm showing you here is one of the sense of manuscripts not selected at all at random. This is my grandfather, Matthew Flatt, who's circled at the bottom, living at home with his parents, who were immigrants to the country, and his seven other brothers and sisters in the one thousand nine hundred and twentys census.

It turns out that my family's story is very representative of what we find in the broader data. So my great grandfather, the immigrant generation never moved up the occupational ladder. And that's something that we see very commonly in both the Ellis Island period, and today that the first generation, the immigrants themselves, move up pretty slowly. So where they start ends up determining when there is a their trajectory will be - if they start with a lot of skills, and they come already Seek a Phd, then that determines one path. If they start coming from a country with less opportunity for education, and they're entering into a low scale of profession, that determines that path.

But the second generation, the children of immigrants rise. And you can see this with my family. The older kids in the family enter into white-collar positions in offices, or retail jobs and stores, and the younger kids, my grandmother and his younger brother enter the professions.

So what i'm hoping to do today is reassess some immigration myths. Is it really true that there's an unprecedented flood of immigration today, and the answer is, no, we've been here before. Did the Ellis Island generation rise quickly with rags to riches and immigrants today are not as successful in moving up? The answer is, No, and we see this from my family. But we also see this when we scale up, and our immigrant families, their children today stuck in a permanent underclass.

And of course the answer again is not so just freely delay the groundwork for discussing these myths

to start off with. Are we in the midst of an unprecedented flood of immigration? We can see here the long history, one hundred and fifty years of immigrant entry into the country, and recently that fourteen percent of the population is foreign born.

If you ask Americans on surveys, they'll tell you that we've never before had such large numbers of migrants. But of course that's not true. We had fourteen percent of the population foreign born one hundred years ago, and in between we see this immigration valley. This dip which is policy-driven with the border closing in the nineteen twentys, and bottoming out at four percent.

Of course these waves are very different, and I wanted to show you that the earlier wave immigration, one thousand eight hundred are primarily immigrants from Europe. That's the yellow part of this graph, whereas today immigrants are coming all over the world.

So there are many reasons to expect that there might be a quite different path today for immigrants. The past doesn't necessarily have to represent, and so, when we end up finding that there is a common immigrant experience. It's really quite surprising, contrary to some of our own expectations going into the research.

So second myth, did the Ellis Island generation rise from rags to riches? This myth is wrong in two different ways, kind of interesting. First of all, a lot of the Ellis Island generation migrants were not arriving in rags. So what we're looking at here the zero line would be earning the same amount as the U.S. foreign born.

And if you see above the zero line. That means that you have immigrated from starting more than one, and the black arms are recent arrivals. The white bars are after we follow these migrants for thirty years. You see immigrants from many Western European countries already earning more than the Us.

So this would be the equivalent of the skilled engineers from India, China, Japan, from Germany. Today we also had many immigrants arriving in poverty, and four of arrivals did not move up to riches within one generation. So the black bars that are below the zero line we see There's some progress by the time you get to thirty years out, but no one is converging to the earnings of the U.S.

Finally, our immigrant families stop at a permanent underclass today. What I'll show you is what happens to children and immigrants for children of white U.S., for parents who are raised with similar resources, similar finances to our childhood, and I'll show you patterns for the twenty fifth percentile of the income distribution. But this pattern is the same If you look at the thirty bit from the fiftieth, and what we're going to find is that the children of immigrants, raised at the same point as the children of the U.S. - born and achieved more economic mobility over their lifetime.

So this is the picture for today. Each one of these dots I know it's very hard to see the collections, but the point is, each one of these dots were black children's parents were born in a set of different the purple dot with the honor our children, whose parents are white and we're in the Us.

And those kids raise a twenty fifth percentile reach around the forty fifth percentile and adult. On average, children of immigrant parents reach the percentile. And you can see the dispersion around that average with with with kids of income parents from some sending countries reaching the sixtieth or sixty fifth percentile, even though they're raised in China.

Same patterns in the past is our kids from one thousand eight hundred and eighty on the left hand side kids from one thousand nine hundred and ten on the right hand side. The Us dot, which is the purple dot, is always for the bottom of the picture, and we see the children of immigrants rising.

Nikita Taniparti: Thank you, Leah. I actually wanted to start with that graph and the idea of where do these myths come from, and what consequences do these myths have? Right? So we all live in the U.S. Many of us are immigrants. Do we hear the narrative of immigration that's unreasonable?

And also in a way you're telling us that that influence is policy where the tension between immigration patterns actually influences the policy debate and the policy decisions in the mid, when you're actually influencing the ability of migrants to actually enter. So can you tell us a little bit more about some of those patterns and the underlying causes of how those two things talk to eachother.

Professor Boustan: So I believe your questions is where do these myths come from? And starting with the myth of an unprecedented flood of migration. Where do we get this within the lifetime of everyone who is in the country today? What they have experienced is a rise from the bottom of the immigration valley There were people who were kids in the nineteen, sixties, Nineteen, seventies and they looked around and saw four percent of the population foreign born. In many parts of the country that meant very close to zero percent more and more so.

And now they look around when they see fourteen percent more and more depending on where they live, and that seems like a first up to some people a frightening or dramatic change.

So we don't have anyone who's really, you know we can from their whole life experience. We're back back on the one hundred and fifty years, and I think we have a lot of amnesia about how extensive migration was during the Ellis Island period.

We also have a lot of focus on what's going on in our southern border, and the discussion of the prices as our quarter. The numbers that we regularly seem scary. Two million contact points at the southern border over the course of this year to date were only in September.

Those long-term points does not be individual. Sometimes there's going to be more than one, or, you know, up to ten, up to fifteen contact points for a single individual, especially   under Covid, under Title Point. But that number seems quite frightening as well and contributes to this sense of crisis. If you think about the other myths, the   the ragged to richest idea that that's actually very widely shared. I mean, there's almost nothing that we can agree on in the Us today, and that's around you.

But what we can agree upon is that the Ellis Island generation was good.

You hear President Trump talking about this when he talks about why, we have more migrants from Norway, and that sort of targeting back to one hundred years ago, saying the miners were better back then.

We also hear President Obama talking about this, not in contrast to immigrants today, but just really holding up and valorizing immigrants of the past. So this it comes from our families, you know, the selective memory of.

I remember my grandfather. I don't remember my great grandfather. He's the one who struggled didn't. You know we never really spoke English. I never moved up the occasional matter. But I remember my grandfather became a doctor, and that's the stories that we tell. It's the stories of great success in our own family. We also hear this in high school there are many cases that were pulled out from the records selectively anecdotal cases of people who came with nothing, and eventually became CEOs,

and we often hear the story of history high school as well. We might explain something different when we tell it to each other and what we actually see. So zooming into this wrath to rich a story where you differentiate between It's not really the first immigrants who come to America who experiences immense and quick ladder of growth, but it's the their children. What does the American dream mean to us just in general. And then how do we understand the American Dream for immigrants?

Well, I think the use of the term American dream is very contentious. We perceive our book as teaching us that the American dream is not dead. It's just as alive today as it was one hundred years ago. We can understand it as the idea of moving to the country to provide better opportunities for our children, even if we, as the immigrant generation might have to sacrifice and suffer in order to do so. But other people have very different and interpretations and meetings of what the American training means. So while we do embrace that term in the book, and if you see the cover image that I showed you on the very first slide, It has a very optimistic, a depiction of immigrants sort of in gray scale in the front, looking forward to what might be New York harbor, and seeing a rainbow above the country.

So there's a very optimistic take that we embrace in the book. At the same time we recognize that the term American dream is very contentious. It means different things to different people. It might be something we can, you know, discuss further. People have a particular reason on that.

Nikita Taniparti: I'll just kind of go over a quick question. So. Ah, we are looking your book. This book looks at immigration from out of the Us. But a lot of your other. One looks at internal migration. It's hard to study that, but we also see a lot of mobility happening even in that valley of immigration, the twenties. So how has your other research trying to understand how mobility and economic outcomes were reshaped in America? How many in economic outcomes were reshaped in America. How many in economic outcomes were reshaped in America? How many in economic output structures change? Is it about agglomerating people as well?

Where people went? What are some of the factors at the beginning? What we observed?

Professor Boustan: Well, one thing that's really interesting about our predators on the children of immigrants is the underlying mechanisms behind them.

You if you chat about this at the dinner party people will tend to say, well, that's not surprising to me, because I know immigrants work harder, they have a better work ethic, and more persistent, and they care more about education. So people have in their mind a sense of immigrant values that they think would then be their kids. What we found in the data is that there's another aspect of being an immigrant that matters a lot and can explain everything that we find in the past, and it's still an important contributing factor today, and that is where immigrants choose to settle.

Immigrants move to the parts of the country that are the most dynamic, and provide the most pathway for upward mobility to anyone.

So what that means is, if you compare an immigrant family to a us-worn family living next door. The children actually don't do any better in the immigrant house? What   How immigrants do better on average is that they tend to find themselves in those places that provide a ability for all in the past. It's quite simple.

Immigrants avoided the U.S. South almost completely so at the time that fourteen percent of the country was foreign born. Only two percent of the population in the South was born, and the sound was an animal's whole region, and cotton growing did not provide good upward mobility for either white or black Americans.

But even if you're living outside the South immigrants went to particular states and cities that had a lot of upward moment  industrial jobs, and that provided pathways for their kids. So when you think about what is that special about immigrants? It's that they reveal themselves willing to leave their homes in order to seek opportunity. They've already broken family ties. They've already left their home country, and once they get to the Us. Then they end up seeking out places that are very dynamic.

But there is a set of American us foreign who also do the same, and those are people who move across state lines. So if we look at us, foreign parents who are living outside of their state of birth.

Their kids look much more similar on average, to the children of immigrants. So really it's this willingness to move. Crossing borders matters a lot. But even internal migration   matters as well.

Nikita Taniparti: And how do we think about moving for economic goals? But then, social integration, How do you create a sense of home in a new place, whether it's moving from Texas to Massachusetts or India to Boston.

Professor Boustan: Well, a couple of things there, I mean. First, I didn't mention anything in the really short presentation about some findings in our book about cultural integration. So we're economists. We started out by looking at how our commitment is sharing the labor market, and what's going on with their earnings. But when we talk to people they said,

Well, it's all very well good, you know. Immigrants move up in earnings, children, immigrants, children, the children, and your parents do well know our immigrants really ever becoming American, and it's hard to define what that means, but the there's a whole set of practices that we can observe in data that will give us some clues here.

So we looked at everything that we could that we could measure both in the past from the present, and that includes food immigrants. Mary. What neighborhoods they live in? Are they surrounded by other immigrants in their neighborhood? Or are they living in more integrated areas? Do they learn English, and what names do they give to their children.

And along all those dimensions we see that immigrants do take steps to change the norms and behaviors as they live in the us, and they start. They end up at the end of their life, or even more like the U.S. born than they do than they did when they first arrived.

So that's how we think about integration, is. It's a very empirical question. If there's no values based upon it not better necessarily to choose names that look like the names of he was born. But let's just watch and observe what immigrants do, and we see that immigrants do start to change their behaviors as they spend time in the Us.

And at the same pace now as they did in the past. So I mean, this is one of those cases where my priors were really changed, I thought, Oh, in the hill this island period there was a lot of pressure from Normandy, and also immigrants were buying for a bureau, which is sort of more similar in cultural dimensions. So immigrants sort of became American very quickly in the past. They've jettisoned their whole language, They, you know, told their kids. Let's only speak English at home, and these days it's very different. Well, these days. It's actually not that different in the data.

But there's another interesting part of this question, which is sort of like underneath the surface, and I just wanted to to mention it. There. There could be trade-offs here where you know, for example, I mentioned immigrants moving out of neighborhoods with high foreign war, and share that some mitigated good, you know, for an immigrants who leave what you know what people would call on-splayed neighborhoods sometimes that comes along with earnings, but it also comes along with cultural loss.

And so we were able to look at this in a really interesting way. With one particular community, we were looking at Jewish immigrants who were moved out of the city of New York, around one thousand nine hundred to cities and towns all around the country through a volunteer self-health program to disperse the Jewish population.

Many of those immigrants did very well, leaving, but also many of those immigrants chose to move back to New York, and the immigrants that chose to move back to New York were different.

Initially, they had more Jewish sounding first aids they had more to resembling last days. So by at least that measure we could see, they were maybe more connected to the whole set of cultural and religious amenities that they would have received in a large immigrant area. And I really want to just make sure that I emphasize that point as well that you know there is going to be an element of loss and trade off when we see immigrants changing their behavior as they spend more time.

And I think that's a really interesting note of optimism that you present in the book, which is how much people actually integrate. And then you say a point of not not so much. Optimism is segregation of African-american communities or Mexican and hispanic communities.

Are there some lessons that you've learned about from a policy perspective. What can you do to facilitate it? A little bit more to a valer to be support convergence of that upward mobility for these left behind communities.

Well, I was thinking about this. You know the connection between my first book and this book here, and you mentioned competition in the Promised Land. One of my main insights in writing that and getting started on the research that led to that book was that African-americans in the us are also an immigrant population. So in one thousand nine hundred around ninety percent of African Americans lived in the South by one thousand nine hundred and seventy. It was more like fifty over fifty, and in order for that rebalancing to happen across regions that represents the movement of millions of people.

And so, If we start to think of African Americans as an immigrant population, we can apply the same lens that we would use in thinking about the various immigrant groups that I showed you on this slide, and in some ways the African-american migration produced very similar results. And In Some ways. It produced very different results.

I would say that the first generation experienced a pretty similar pattern, where, by the meaning of the those black migrants who moved from south to north, doubled their earnings, and that's the same as the European migrants in the Ellis Island period doubling their earnings by beefing Italy by leaving Norway and moving to the us.

When African-americans arrived in industrial cities in the North, they did not earn as much as the existing black population.

And there was convergence over the course of their lifetime. So it wasn't complete convergence. But there was movement in earnings for the first generation. What's really different?

So has been the experience of the second generation, the children of the great black migrants,

and I didn't realize this how profound this was, until the work of a Laura Drennan or my colleague at Princeton, who was able to look at the second generation of children who were being great, of, of course, or in the early nineteen eighty S. In cities that had high or not as high inflows during the great black migration period. And then the children that were a part of that   second generation.   who lives in high grade black migration areas did not aspire as much upward mobility at all. So that's where the difference really lies, and you dig below the surface. It's the boys from that generation, and not the girls that were really experiencing this damper on Hubble mobility.

Now put that in touch with what we're finding in the dot box that I was showing you. I showed you a dot plot for the sons I called them the children of, but they were the sons of foreign-born parents. We have a similar plot in the boat for the daughters, and we see a very different pattern for  . The daughters of immigrants from the Caribbean from majority black countries than we do for the sons. It's quite similar to what a lure is found for the second generation of the great black migration. So here i'm starting to see some echoes.

It's not true for all majority of black countries. We only have five of those sending countries in our data and due to privacy restrictions.

But for Nigeria and Dominican Republic the sons are also doing very well what I'm thinking about. Here are the data for Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad, and tobacco there. The sons are the one exception to this role that I told you that the children of immigrants out reform the children of white us for the children from those whose parents came from those countries. The sons are around to connect with the white Us. Form, but they're not out remarkable.

The daughters are doing spectacularly well. So there is intersection here between race and gender,

and it's showing up for whether your parents are foreign born, or whether your parents are part of this internal migration wave from south to north and I, you know certainly there's some suggestive evidence. And all this paper that is incarceration and policing.

How is the earnings of someone who is incarcerated measured in our data?

If you're incarcerated, you're still in the dataset. But you're if you have essentially zero learning, and that's really pulling down the average, and we were able to take that group out now. I'm not saying we should, because they're a meaningful part of the average.

But if we were able to take that group out, my guess is that the sons from those three countries I mentioned Jamaica Trend at to Vega and Haiti would be helpful for the Hawaiian restaurant. And so there is this over-policing and incarceration in Caribbean neighborhoods, as well as in the Neighborhood of the initial of great black Migrants, and that is something that primarily affects the sons of outdoors, and that's one more question that I know the audience of questions, too. But so you've told us about how everybody's trying to point them to the Us.

You sacrifice everything for your children. You really really try to make it, and then people leave and go back home. So migrants return, and I think the folks that both put it at about twenty, five to thirty percent.

Why do people return home? How do we understand what they do when they return home. How can you amplify the positive benefits of return migrants?

So we had just talked about how some people, some Jewish migrants, were sent to cities and towns around the country, and returned back to New York City. Part of what they were attorney for is a sentence of cultural and religious amenities in this large Jewish economy.

So now not to find that find your home country versus the United States. Some people are returning home because of the full of their home country. But they're not moving to the Us. Necessarily, you know, out of some kind of misunderstanding or mis oppression of what they'll mind here. I think the term migrants are often very strategic.

They understand that by moving to the Us. Like I said, you can double your earnings. And today, actually, in many cases it's more than double your earnings.

So doubling your earnings was for the internal migration south to north that didn't face any mobility barriers as well As for the Ellis Island period, where there were very few migration restrictions today with so many migration restrictions, the return to migration is actually elevated, and you might even trouble or quadruple your money.

So imagine that in the long run you do want to live in your home country. But you know that there's this opportunity to move to a place, take it for three to five years. Earn a lot, and if you come home you end up deep frogging over some of the people from your from your local area that did not be. You can use the money that you've saved up to buy land. You can use it to build a house, you can use it to start a business. You can import some of the knowledge that you have that you've ah acc ulated and acquired here in the Us as well back to the whole country.

So we actually have seen this in the case of the Princeton area. We have a large Guatemalan community, and there were there was a a a guy who went to bed through our public schools, Princeton High School, and while he was at Winston High School. He was working at the local pizzeria, and he learned about bring up and pizza, and he brought and imported some ovens from New Jersey back to Guatemala,and he started the first, for out of Korea in his whole country, and it spreads around the country. And so That's the kind of local knowledge that you might get. And i'm not only talking about, you know the science technology like the high skill you may be able to import a problem of knowledge across. And in many industries. So people come to gay knowledge also to gain savings and intentionally.

No, that's not everyone. Some people return because of employment shops, health shops, family  , unexpected events when they need to return. But for many people return migration is part of a strategy, and really has always been around twenty five percent of the term migration in Ellis Island period and around twenty, five percent today.

I think we'll take a few questions, but maybe for honest, you can have a hand the mic to people. And as you're doing that I would really love about the focus, how it talks between data and these stories. So it will. The average story, not the Elam.  . I don't think there's a question over here first, that okay second room a registered name, and you

Hi   My name is Karissa. So i'm wondering if you managed to identify whether the upward economic mobility and information between Tommaker and Joe Taylor, because there's a notion that migrants are taking American jobs, and i'm wondering whether it's true.

I mean this is an enormous question, so I could go on at late. I want to make sure we have time for everyone else, but it's,

I think, very hard to differentiate and put a label on someone as a maker or a jobmaker. Certainly we have this sense of high-level immigrants are creating jobs for others by opening businesses by patenting and invention and science, and that's one. But we also have for low, skilled immigrants all sorts of ways in which more skilled immigrants are contributing to job creation and expansion of industriesSo I'll give you a couple examples. One is markets that just simply wouldn't exist if we didn't have immigrants here working in those areas. People often say, Well, if if immigrants weren't here, then the wages would rise, and us foreign would take the job, and we would just continue as always.

I'll think about how this works in agriculture. For example, in the one thousand nine hundred and sixtys, we had a strong guest worker program in Mexico called the Brassero Program. President Johnson ended it, and his thought was, Well, if we don't have the restaurant workers, then we'll have to   agricultural jobs for investment. Kay was around a dollar an hour at the time, and farmers started to raise pay a little one dollars twenty five. Us home workers still did not come to the field, and so farmers decided well at that pay dollar twenty five. It might be worthwhile to be instead to invest in new machinery, to harvest or awesome. They shut down the production of these crops that have to be   tended by hand, and instead, i'll shift into crops that could be harvested by the machine, so that market the market strawberries, asparagus,   micro greens, avocados, those   you know, free soapy and vegetables that we enjoy today.   dried up, and the types of fruits and vegetables that we had in the late sixtys early seventys for the types that you could easily harvest by machine, so that industry just simply shut down and shifted away from hand-harvested for sessions. Think about what would happen if we didn't have immigrants entering in hair salons and managing.

I would simply paint our meals at home, and that is what I used to. I mean. I'm like a child in the seventys. We didn't have   really an iceberg wet and frozen fruit and vegetables. We painted our nails at home, an idea that you would go and like get a manager was just

like something that only the very rich would do. And now it's an enormous industry that's available to many people. And so that is the kind of job creation for others that even lower skilled immigrants can provide by creating markets that said they were not there. Think about childcare. Many, many people would want to pull out of the core, pay market work in order to care for their own day full time and with childcare, and we now have an expansion of job opportunities for others, because we thinking the same.

Thank you so much for having me. My name is Carol. Let me see if I must be better so. One of my questions was around   using saving engagement as a key indicator of integration is wrong. There's sometimes a notion that you parents. Don't like to get involved in seven, five

But I actually used to work for the city of Boston, and we were at the Civic Academy, for I mean grandson.

We've always got applications for it, right? So i'm just really curious to see if you use that as a key indicator of integration, you know, around the country as well.

That's a great idea. I have not, and thank you, though, is also asking me a little bit about immigrants and patriotism. And I've actually thought to myself, Well, it's really hard for us to measure such a thing. But in the past hand today, today we have really good surveys, surveys of trust and institutions and attitudes towards American ideals and immigrants were higher than the Us. Warrant on all of the development. So immigrants are more patriotic Americans than us four, and J. But I have no idea what this would have looked like in the past. We don't go back and do attitudinal surveys. But then I was thinking about it in more detail, and I was like, well,

I mean we can look at registering and enlistment for World War, One World War II. We can look at registering as a border, and that's something that I actually supervised a senior basis for someone who was working on the Cps voter supplement on both Asian, American and Hispanic American voter registration. So there's a lot that we could have done. We didn't do by I'm Kate Jenning, who shared the growth up, and I was wondering do you immigrants who come to the Us as children and They look more like first-generation rooms for second generation.

So that is a really good question. The one point. Five generation are included as children of immigrants in our data. And so they're contributing to the n bers that we see.

So if you break them out of in the data, they sort of look halfway between the the first generation and the second, but they are included in our social mobility N bers There tends to be sort of a rival Age cut off, after which the ah first the one point. Five generation looks more like the first generation, so they do face more barriers, and that tends to be at around like twelve years old, and so it has to do with learning English fluidly. And spending more time in American schools and public schools. And so they you can think of them as sort of in between. So if you're interested in what the social mobility of the second generation, purely like people who are born in the country. Then you would have to script those folks out, and my guess is that what we would find would look even more startling in terms of we're mobility that the and but I was wondering if it then in the add to the diversity of the place, for would there be reverse consolidity, et cetera, or some self-sustaining process, that if you look at all into that and the second one is I.

After I read your book. I saw another woman that we reached coming with a little bit of the idea that you know immigrants bring a lot of Ah, I don't know what to call it main to the trains, and so on. Heard that, and and I mean that has been used by in some papers. By. I think about this and others on on, you know, attitudes towards their ability or marriage, or whatever that that come with immigration. And I can Guest done, thought that all Catholics were drunk, and it imposed restrictions on alcohol and whatever. So I was wondering, What can you say about this concerning the you know values being, you know, the challenge.

Oh,so on the first question. I think you're really undoubtedly right that if there weren't immigrants in those places, and those places wouldn't look as dynamic as they do   in terms of the density of industrial jobs. Let's say nineteen, ten or twenty. There's some decision on the parklands where to locate, and they're from located places where they have access to a strong and robust labor force. So what we're saying here is morally descriptive, just in a very mechanical sense. Once we account for geography, the advantages that we see for the second generation children dissipate and think of it, just as I described that if you compare the next door, neighbors, we don't see this immigrant advantage anymore. But there it is.

It's certainly possible that one of the elements that makes those markets   more advantageous is because they have immigrants in them.

Yes, it could be so. Connor and Michael Stewart had a paper of pnas a couple of years ago, where they tried to understand in the past what makes a market more dynamic? What makes for all remote, and they basically do a horse race between public schooling and industrial jobs. And in the past, at these industrial jobs mattered a lot more and interestingly, the children of immigrants that we're looking at in the past have fewer years of education than the children of the Us. Born, raised at the same point in the income distribution, despite earning more

So they're earning more, even though they're acting at the educational Spanish. So they're in markets that had a lot of industrial and manufacturing job opportunities. And therefore, if you're thinking about the opportunity, cost of staying in school for an extra year, i'm losing out

on the possibility of starting work. So people tended to leave school a little bit earlier, and in fact, it was in some of these more rural areas where public schooling really began and took off as sort of the work of.

So, at least historically, these areas were not necessarily the places with good public schooling, and they were, instead places of with really industrial powerhouses, possibly also with immigration, and the diversity of place contributing to that advantage

On the second question about bringing negative traits, whatever the trade might be, that trait disappears very quickly. And so it is not entirely clear from the question or the the work that you're citing, which trades people have in mind. But whatever it is, they see that immigrants are race around half of the gap between their own behaviors and the behaviors of the Us. Born in the first generation, and by the second generation those gaps are almost entirely closed, if not entirely so. There are newspapers by R Kel, Fernandez, and others that show that there is some long term vestige of the country that your parents came from.

It's a long-term vestige in terms of you can pick up as a a statistically significant effect of where your parents had been born. But it's not important in an our spirit sense. It doesn't explain very much of the difference between behaviors according to where your parents were based. So if you have enough data, you can certainly pick up this association, whether it's women's, labor, force, participation, or fertility, behaviors, or what have you? There are some immigrants coming from countries where women are less likely to work where it's expected that you would have five or six children instead of two children, and you can pick off vestiges of this in the second generation. But it doesn't explain very much. The overall pattern is really one of.

I think that it's also interesting because I mean when people talk about we should only allow high-school workers, or and say no it always sense, because a lot of your findings are about it. Actually doesn't matter, because, you see, it has been all of that kind of converging to this integration of our mobility, and really just positive followers.

I want to. You just say one big thing on that which is, there was a really truly excellent piece, very much engaging with the ideas and streets of gold by Raymond Salam, that just came out in Foreign Policy Magazine, and I don't know if you guys have great han. He's the president of the Manhattan Institute.

He's often on fox news. We don't agree on everything.

But there's a lot of scope for overlap and places of agreement where we disagreed was really on this question of how selective immigration should be, and the way I see it, it's a question of how many slots we have available right now. We have seven hundred thousand visa slots and around a million if you count direct spaces that come in without being part of that quota. So around a million interests a year, sure if we cut that number to one hundred thousand. I don't think we should, but if we did, and that's what happened during the one thousand nine hundred and twenty four to closure, Maybe we would want to prioritize the response to the scientists and engineers who contribute a lot in terms of economic growth in the first generation.

But if we have a million slots, or if we have a million, three hundred thousand songs, which is what some think tanks in Dc. Are suggesting, we need to keep up with the demographics and the slowing down in population growth, you know, like adding three hundred and about slots. We're not talking something incredibly dramatic here. But we're talking about one point, three million slots. Well, then, let's think about what the labor market means are currently.

Do we need agricultural workers? Do we need child care? Do we need elder care construction? Do we need other personal services? There are many ways in which immigrants who did not get a chance to even go to high school, or did not get a chance to finish high school in their home country many ways that they contribute to the economy today, and then what we're adding in streets of gold is to say that their children are not always going to be doing the same job, same occupations as their parents. The children have the opportunity, once they are educated in the Us. And fluent in English, to move up above the Median.

Thank you very much. I have a follow-up question on the discussion that we just had a record also on cultural assignation.

So following what you explained earlier about how my word is to let into more dynamic communities. And how does kind of someone observe over time? I wouldn't expect that these communities culture also?

Ah simulates more to an international culture in a way right, so that the effect isn't necessarily only driven from migrants as stimuli to Americans. But the Americans becoming more international in a way, right? And so along these lines.

I wonder if there is some observed pattern of polarization, cultural polarization, where, on the one hand, you have this culturally diverse environment where people, you know, immigrants move to, and then kind of the opposite.

I think that it's very profound, and that's undoubtedly going on. We do talk about it around the edges. It's about about the different contributions that immigrants make it's, not just economic contributions. It's also bringing their foods, their music, different aspects of their culture with them, and the opportunity to live in a state like New Jersey, where I live, which is one of the most immigrant densities in the country, and you know to me it's a really incredible set of opportunities for cultural exchange.

And that's a preference that I hold, but not everybody. And so there may be continued sorting along those lines geographic sorting, or even if you all live in the same area, there might be my overall sorting where you go to different churches where you go to different restaurants, and I think that that's like Seems like it's certainly going on at an anecdotal level. But I think it's okay.

I think it would be great to get a handle on and measure and  , and and have some ways of getting out of quantitatively the way that we talk about it. And I think that makes sense to me is that assimilation is a two way street. You know that immigrants change to become Americans, but us foreign also change   when immigrants right for course, migrants or minders that are going to be distribution on the basis. But do you see the success? That because it's lower the barrier of my patient because that area so do you see any success?

So are you talking about refugees? And yeah, they used to display right?

So I mean, this has been really fascinating. There is good work done on refugee population in the Us. And also around the world in the modern data. But no one has ever come back to think about people who would be classified as refugees. One hundred years ago our refugee system was established in one thousand nine hundred and eighty. Before that we had some refugee act that designated particular populations as refugees going back to one thousand nine hundred and forty eight. But before that we had an

There were many immigrants from Europe who arrived due to a flight of persecution. So we wanted to look at that group as well, and we were able to do this, using some world histories of immigrants, who arrived between one thousand eight hundred and ninety, and one thousand nine hundred and fifty; and we found that these immigrants classified as refugees by us, according to the stories that they told for their reason for moving, were ah assimilating more fully into us Society, as measured by their details of their ability to see English.

We had one hour's speech of these folks like that. When we had a audio tape we could classify their accent. We had a transcript. We could classify their vocabulary, and we found that refugee immigrants were more successful at integrating, and can think about the economic explanations. For this it makes a lot of sense. If you have no expectation that you'll be able to go home.

You talked about the twenty five percent, which for migrants, then you have a stronger incentive to start investing in learning English, embedding yourself into labor market adwords, social networks.

We also looked at this in today for the modern data with using the new immigrant survey, and we see the same matter.

Other people have done similar work on refugees, modern data and find that refugees might start out with working staff, but they move up very quickly, and so I think all of the evidence is starting to line up that immigrants who feel like they have no home to go back to are those that actually is similar to that.

Thank you. Thank you for the talk, and uh for the very nice Ah, Kevin session, my question is related to Ah, what used to work in the past that may or may not be working today. And I can think of several, just you know, listening to you. One is the role that industrial employment has played in the past.

If the factories now are either in China, or at least in Alabama and rural parts.

Other things also that we go wrong or may have. But we are maybe, uh, just have of housing in these particularly dynamic places, and and so as an immigrant to have access to these places today. And the third thing is maybe the cost of education. 

So we have limited ability to really answer carefully, because our historical data is incredible. We have millions of people exactly where they're living or their neighbors.  , We know their education level and their industry and their application. The modern data that I showed you comes from the opportunity, insights lab, and when we're lucky enough to get attitudes from them of how children will raise a different income distribution there later in life according to their parents.

But we do not have the money or data, so we don't know education. We don't know occupation. We don't even know exactly where the schools are living. 

Which is a lot smaller and doesn't. Have good geography, anyhow, and we found that geography matters today, but not as much as a day of the past, which means a lot of scope for other explanation. Just because we see similar matters of over mobility doesn't mean that the mechanisms have to be exactly the same in the past. Geography was just overwhelmingly a factor that mattered today. It may not matter as much, but we still see that it does matter, and I think that housing markets are somewhat of a key here.

The most productive areas in the country are now obscenely expensive to move to,

and immigrants seem to have a comparative advantage of moving to these high expense places relative to the Us. Born in part, because they're willing to live in smaller housing units and double up in part, because they actually send some of their budget back at all through remittances or saving to go home. And so they don't spend as much of their budget on the high cost of living location, whereas the Us. Foreign are spending their money almost entirely locally.

And so these reasons immigrants are sort of on this edge and getting into the most productive places still today. But I think there's probably going to be a lot more scope for education mattering in the modern data than it did in the past. And we just we love to be able to work with the micro data. Maybe one day we can, or maybe that will be another source that will allow us to do that.

I think I'm going to actually go ahead, and i'm so sorry to be able to ask the questions. Maybe you didn't come to the ah right now. If you haven't read the book, or any of the s work. We've focused on one of our characters book around people. So you can be tested on what you learn today, but kind of reframing. As a lot of countries are in political type of ideological models of a very complex multi-passeted thing, or As you were saying, you might see similar trends, but the nineteen essence can be very different.

So there's a lot of things I think, for us to be into, as there are policymakers of people who work policy papers by doing research.     So I really want to say thank you for starting the conversation here today. And hopefully, we can really about to continue this.

Thank you, Nikita. Thank you to everyone for your questions. I really appreciate it.