When the Tide Turned: Immigration and the Delay of the Great Black Migration

Abstract

This article uses state and city level data to evaluate empirically Brinley Thomas's immigrant-as-deterrent view of the relationship between black emigration from the South and European immigration to the North. The article suggests a Todaro-like interpretation of the Great Migration, which emphasizes the importance of job availability to blacks in determining their expected wages. The combination of mass European immigration and hiring practices that favored white immigrants over blacks may have delayed the Great Migration by decades. The empirical work supports this view.

Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws and the Great Migration

“…They treated Southern blacks like the European indentured servants that provided labor for 18 th century Southern farmlands. The Great Migration did not start earlier, despite the pressure on Southern blacks, because Northern factory owners preferred to hire educated white workers (Collins, 1997). This neglect made the prosperity of the 1920s in the United States and Europe into a temporary pause in hostilities rather than a durable peace.…”

Factor Endowments and the Returns to Skill: New Evidence from the American Past

“…Similarly, the South, with its sharecropping system and Jim Crow legislation, had a large supply of unskilled labor of both races (Ransom andSutch 2001, Collins 1997). Furthermore, black unskilled labor was locked in the South by the large ‡ows of immigrants from Europe and racial discrimination in non-farm employment in the U.S. in general (Collins 1997). The West, with its relatively sparse population, had an abundant resource endowment that was only beginning to be exploited in the early twentieth century (Nelson and Wright 1992).…”

The Cliometrics of International Migration: A Survey

“…When the immigration to the Northeast slowed dramatically in the 1920s this process slowed down. Collins (1997) finds that it also quickened the movement of blacks from the South to the Northern states. One implication of findings like these is that, even though immigrants were highly concentrated, their effects on the labour market percolated throughout the economy.…”