How the Other Half Died: Immigration and Mortality in U.S. Cities

Abstract

Fears of immigrants as a threat to public health have a long and sordid history. At the turn of the 20th century, when immigrants made up one-third of the population in crowded American cities, contemporaries blamed high urban mortality rates on the newest arrivals. We evaluate how the implementation of country-specific immigration quotas in the 1920s affected urban health. Cities with larger quota-induced reductions in immigration experienced a persistent decline in mortality rates, driven by a reduction in deaths from infectious diseases. The unfavorable living conditions immigrants endured explains the majority of the effect as quotas reduced residential crowding and mortality declines were largest in cities where immigrants resided in more crowded conditions and where public health resources were stretched thinnest.

The Effects of Immigration in a Developing Country: Brazil in the Age of Mass Migration

“…This paper also contributes to the literature focusing on the economics of the Age of Mass Migration (e.g., Abramitzky and Boustan 2017;Hatton and Ward 2019), and more particularly to studies of the effects of immigration in this period (e.g., Abramitzky et al 2023;Ager et al 2021;Cohen and Biddle 2022;Price, vom Lehn, and Wilson 2023;Tabellini 2020). 10 Just as the economics of immigration has focused on developed-10 In addition to bringing a different perspective with its focus on Brazil, this paper provides an important insight on the effects of immigration to the United States in the Age of Mass Migration, albeit in a counterfactual sense.…”

“…Canonical studies focus on the labor-market effects of immigration, largely in the United States after the transition to its current immigration regime in 1965 (e.g., Abramitzky and Boustan 2017;Borjas 2003Borjas , 2014Card 1990Card , 2005Hanson 2009;Kerr and Kerr 2011), with a smaller set focusing on the effects of immigration in other modern developed countries (e.g., Dustmann, Schönberg, and Stuhler 2016;Manacorda, Manning, and Wadsworth 2012). This literature is enriched by studies focusing on the effects of immigration in the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (e.g., Abramitzky et al 2023;Ager et al 2021;Cohen and Biddle 2022;Hatton and Williamson 1998;Price, vom Lehn, and Wilson 2023;Tabellini 2020), which exploit a variety of advantages of this historical setting, such as the long time horizon, open borders, the ability to follow individuals over time, and differences in economic structure to important feature of Brazilian immigration-was considered but was ultimately banned by the Foran Act in 1885. In the later years of the Age of Mass Migration, southern and eastern European immigrants were criticized for their supposed unwillingness to settle in the US South (Benton-Cohen 2018;Zimran 2022).…”