Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility: A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants

Abstract

Proponents of restrictive immigration policies often claim that families arriving with fewer skills and resources will struggle economically. This claim is challenging to test as lower-skilled migrants also tend to face greater discrimination, exclusion, and obstacles in the United States. I use unique multigenerational data on Irish Americans in the early-twentieth century, before and after migration, to directly study how the economic origins of Irish families and the reception context they faced in the United States affected economic attainment in the second generation. This analysis finds weak associations between economic background in Ireland and second-generation earnings in the United States. The schooling context and ethnic communities of settlement locations in the United States, in contrast, have strong effects on the second generation. These findings indicate that the experiences of immigrant families in the United States may be more important for second-generation attainment than the skills and resources brought from the origin country in the immigrant generation.

The Melting-Pot Problem? The Persistence and Convergence of Premigration Socioeconomic Status During the Age of Mass Migration

“…Similarly, immigrants enter new racial/ethnic hierarchies that may place individuals and groups in less desirable positions. The local labor market context, where immigrants transfer their premigration skills, may also reward certain positions and groups over others (Connor 2018b). At the same time, endogenous contextual influences deriving from the society of origin, such as its cultural, political, or economic conditions, influences the first generations' environment in which they grew up.…”

“…Since immigrants with lower status backgrounds often entered manufacturing, the sectors would have lifted them up to positions similar to those with a higher status background who did not enter manufacturing sectors. Empirical work analyzing the importance of manufacturing, however, has shown that these sectors had little effect in producing mobility for both the first and second generations (Catron 2016;Waldinger 2007;Connor 2018b). Indeed, first generation immigrants who entered manufacturing firms ended their careers in positions similar to what they startedpositions at the bottom (Catron 2016).…”

“…While family background characteristics determined entry into high school, the effects were weak suggesting that these policies began separating the second generation from their parental background status (Perlmann 1990). Indeed, the local schooling context removed the effects of premigration status, apart from children with elite backgrounds, among Irish immigrants during this period (Connor 2018b). The opportunity structure that severed the link between premigration background status and second-generation success, however, was unequal where processes unfold differently depending on the geographic context (Connor 2019b;Sassler 2006).…”

“…Although there remain significant differences, this convergence continues through the second generation. As Connor (2018b) shows, immigrants from an elite background in Ireland held a small economic advantage across generations compared to Irish immigrants with less elite backgrounds. However, all other immigrants from Ireland reported no statistically discernible difference across settlement.…”

“…Much of this research, however, has relied on synthetic-cohort analyses since there are few datasets that link immigrant parents to their offspring. However, with the development of panel datasets using full-count censuses and other historical sources, there has been a resurgence of research seeking to understand how long socioeconomic differences persist (Abramitzky et al 2014;Connor 2018b;Ward 2018). This study enters this debate by investigating how long differences in premigration socioeconomic status lasted within and across immigrant groups who entered at the turn of the twentieth century.Specifically, this article develops a new dataset that tracks within-family intergenerational mobility across multiple time-points measured both in the sending country and through settlement.…”