What caused a large increase in the amount of Irish people immigrating to the United States during the nineteenth century?

Ireland's Great Famine in the late 1840s marked a turning point in the country's demographic and economic history. From a population that numbered just over eight million in 1841, it is estimated that the famine caused the death of about one million Irish and drove another million to emigrate by the early 1850s (Ó Gráda 1999, ch. 3). Most of the Irish emigrants settled in the United States, where virtually open borders gave sanctuary from the imminent threat of starvation and disease (Ó Gráda 2019). The US absorbed over 500,000 new arrivals from Ireland between the famine's onset in 1846 and 1850 (Ferenczi and Wilcox, 1929, Barde et al., 2006). This paper picks up the Irish migrants’ story on American shores. We build new datasets to study the economic status and labor market assimilation of the famine-era Irish immigrants, with a particular focus on the adult labor market outcomes of the immigrants’ children.

Irish migration to the US had been growing since the 1830s as part of a general rise in transatlantic migration (Mokyr and Gráda, 1982, Gráda, 1983, Cohn, 2009), but the sharp increase in arrivals during the famine dwarfed previous arrival cohorts. This large wave of arrivals marked the start of the “Age of Mass Migration,” and likely comprised the largest group of refugees from a single source that the US has ever absorbed relative to the size of its population.1 The increased volume of Irish immigration coincided with an apparent change in the migrants’ characteristics in comparison to earlier, more prosperous arrivals (Handlin 1991 [1941] p. 51; Miller 1985 p. 295; Anbinder 1992, p. 7). This intensified the view of many Americans at the time that the Irish migrants’ relative poverty, tendency to live near one another, and predominantly Catholic religion were barriers to their assimilation and, therefore, justified restrictions on immigration and immigrants’ rights (Higham, 1955, Anbinder, 1992, Hirota, 2017). Such concerns have resurfaced throughout US history in response to the arrival of poor or culturally “different” immigrants. In this case, the nativist response was severe, including the political ascent of the “Know Nothings” (Anbinder, 1992, Alsan et al., 2019), but US policymakers did not curtail European immigration until the 1920s, bringing an end to the Age of Mass Migration.

Although the size and historical prominence of the famine-era cohort of Irish immigrants makes them a particularly interesting group to study, data constraints have made it difficult to do so. To overcome these constraints, we constructed a new micro-level dataset by linking males born in Ireland, Germany, Britain, and the US from the 1850 to the 1880 complete-count US censuses. The linked dataset is large and national in scope. It includes household heads and their sons, enabling us to compare labor market outcomes for immigrant and native groups over two generations, and to consider the second generation's labor market outcomes in light of individual-level variation in their early life circumstances. Moreover, the new dataset's panel structure helps us to avoid biases from cohort quality changes and selective return migration that tend to confound inferences from cross-sectional census data (Lubotsky, 2007, Abramitzky et al., 2014). That is, because we follow a fixed set of men over time, there are no changes in sample composition. The inclusion of German and British immigrants, who comprised the next largest groups of immigrants in this period, allows for useful comparisons across arrival cohorts and across immigrant groups, which in turn helps to illustrate the distinctiveness of the famine-era Irish.

The children's economic outcomes are especially interesting in the context of concerns about the long-run assimilation of new immigrant groups. Immigrants’ children's outcomes have garnered considerable attention in the economics literature on migration (e.g., Borjas, 1992, Borjas, 1993, Card et al., 2000, Card, 2005, Caponi, 2011, Abramitzky et al., 2014, Alexander and Ward, 2018, Abramitzky et al., 2019b). But to our knowledge, this is the first paper to study the children of the large cohorts of immigrants who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century US, at the start of the Age of Mass Migration. This is also one of a small number of papers that address long-run patterns of economic assimilation by refugee immigrants or their children, whose experiences and outcomes may differ from those of other migrant groups (Edin et al., 2003, Cortes, 2004, Beaman, 2012, Evans and Fitzgerald, 2017).2

Our focus on the immigrants’ children is also a practical consequence of the historical census data's limitations. The censuses of this era did not inquire directly about each immigrant's year of arrival. This poses a major challenge to discerning between those who arrived before or after the Irish famine's onset and, in general, to any study of immigrant assimilation in this early period.3 Nonetheless, in 1850, we can determine the arrival cohort for many household heads by examining their children's birth-year and country-of-birth information.4 This approach definitively categorizes the household head's arrival cohort (“pre-famine” or “famine-era”) for over two-thirds of the sons of Irish immigrants. The relatively high classification rate makes studying the children's outcomes attractive—we know whether their household head arrived before or during the famine, observe their childhood household characteristics in 1850 in detail, and then see their labor market outcomes as prime-aged adult workers in 1880. In addition, we show that the “classified” set of children is fairly representative of all immigrants’ children circa 1850 in terms of observable characteristics and that the omission of “unclassified” children from the baseline analysis is unlikely to confound our conclusions.

We use the new dataset to address three main sets of questions. First, in 1850, how different were the households headed by famine-era Irish migrants from those headed by earlier Irish migrants, concurrent migrants from Germany and Britain, and US natives? In particular, is there evidence of a differential change in Irish household heads’ human capital (reflecting changing selection) and labor market outcomes (reflecting both selection and labor market conditions for newly arrived migrants) between the pre-famine and famine-era migrants? Given this paper's motivation, we care about changing migrant selection primarily because it directly influenced the average household characteristics and economic resources of immigrants’ children, though documenting the patterns of migrant selection at the time of the famine is also of independent interest (e.g., Mokyr and Gráda, 1982, Cohn, 1995). Consistent with the predictions of a simple Roy (1951)-Borjas (1987) model, we find clear evidence of deterioration in the human capital of Irish immigrant household heads with the onset of the famine, as measured by literacy and age heaping in 1850. This is the clearest evidence to date on human capital differences between pre-famine and famine-era arrivals.5 We also document a decline in occupational status between the pre-famine and famine-era Irish, both absolutely and relative to differences over arrival cohorts for other immigrant groups. Thus, by changing both the composition and volume of Irish migration, the Great Famine resulted in a large cohort of relatively poor immigrant children in the US circa 1850.

Second, in 1880, how did the adult labor market outcomes of Irish famine migrants’ sons compare to those of other immigrants’ and US natives’ sons? Studying these outcomes provides perspective on the potential for long-term assimilation in a setting where a variety of forces—including inauspicious early-life conditions, an environment rife with anti-Irish sentiment, and a continuing influx of new immigrants—may have hindered Irish children's advancement. We find that, on average, the sons of the famine-era Irish immigrants fared poorly in the labor market as adults in comparison with other groups in 1880. Nonetheless, in comparison to their fathers’ starting point, they greatly narrowed the gap in occupational status relative to US natives’ sons. The gap is even smaller when considering their adverse childhood environment (i.e., when controlling for 1850 household characteristics). In this sense, fairly strong economic assimilation occurred over generations. The labor market outcomes of Irish immigrants circa 1850 were thus a poor guide to inferring the group's ability to assimilate over a generation.

Finally, we examine heterogeneity in the upward mobility of the children of famine-era Irish immigrants according to observable characteristics, including measures of their father's human capital, residence in an Irish enclave, geographic mobility, and social distance (specifically, having a surname that we determine to be predominantly Catholic). The data and setting do not allow clear identification of causal relationships; they do, however, provide novel evidence on factors that may have facilitated or impeded immigrants’ intergenerational gains. In particular, we find that having a more Catholic surname and being born in Ireland were associated with less upward mobility, conditional on other observables. This pattern is consistent with the presence of discrimination against Irish Catholics, lower levels of human capital for Irish Catholics, and long-term negative consequences from exposure to the famine, all of which merit closer examination in future research.

This paper contributes to the study of the economics and history of immigration in several dimensions. Most directly, the paper advances our knowledge of the Age of Mass Migration, especially of Irish migration during the famine. It is thus complementary to research by Gráda and O'Rourke, 1997, Hatton and Williamson, 1998, Ferrie, 1999, Cohn, 2009, Abramitzky et al., 2012, Abramitzky et al., 2014), Alexander and Ward (2018), and Ó Gráda (2019), among others. By studying immigrants’ experiences in the early portion of the period, in contrast to recent scholarship that has focused on the post-1900 period, the paper brings the first cohorts of the Age of Mass Migration into sharper focus. More broadly, studying the experience of Irish famine-era migrants may yield insights into the economics of large-scale migration due to natural or man-made disasters.6 By studying a large wave of migrants and their offspring long before the implementation of restrictive immigration policies, the paper yields insight into the migration and assimilation processes in a setting where economic forces predominated. Finally, our emphasis on economic assimilation in the long run speaks to a core theme of the international migration literature, both historical and contemporary.7 Issues of migrant assimilation have become particularly salient in recent years, as large numbers of refugees have sought residence in the United States and Europe (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2017). This has fueled a debate in which concerns about immigrants’ assimilation have been cited as justification for more restrictive policies (e.g., Kelly 2018), such as proposals that potential entrants be screened to favor those with a greater “likelihood of successful assimilation and contribution to the United States” (US Department of State et al. 2017, p. 8). In the Irish case, we find that despite a deterioration in migrant selection, poor labor market outcomes soon after arrival, and a political backlash, the migrants’ children converged strongly, albeit incompletely, on natives’ outcomes by 1880. In this sense, they showed clear evidence of “assimilation and contribution” to the American economy.

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