Two Centuries of Mass Migration Offers Insights Into the Future of Global

Global Migration orld migration has demographic transition as modern develop- Two centuries been going on for centuries, ment unfolds: improved nutrition and health and free mass migration—of conditions cause child mortality rates to fall, of mass those not coerced, like slaves thereby raising the share of surviving children migration Wand indentured servants—has been going in the population. After a couple of decades, on for the past two. The reasons people move this glut of children becomes a glut of young offers insights are no big mystery: they do it today, as they adults, exactly those who are most responsive into the future did two centuries ago, to improve their lives. to emigration incentives. What has changed is who is migrating and These demographic events were impor- of global where they come from. tant in pushing poor Europeans overseas in movements Both the demand for long-distance moves swelling numbers in the late 19th century from poor to rich countries and the ability of and even more important in pushing poor of people the potential migrants to finance those moves third-world workers to the first world in the have soared over the past two centuries. As late 20th century. At the other end of this the gap in living standards between the third demographic transition are the rich indus- Jeffrey G. world and the first world widened in the 20th trial countries, where population aging con- Williamson century, the incentive to move increased. At tributes to a scarcity of working adults and the same time, improved educational lev- thus to a first-world immigration pull that els and living standards in poor parts of the reinforces the third-world emigration push. world—and falling transport costs globally, Thus, the dramatic rise in world mass migra- thanks to new technologies—have made it tion after the 1960s should have come as no increasingly possible for potential emigrants surprise to any observer who has paid attention to finance the move. European migrants wait to enter New York, around 1900. Thus, over time, poorer and poorer potential migrants, those who live the farthest from high-wage labor markets, have escaped the poverty trap. This emigration fact implies an immigration corollary that has important political backlash implications: relative to native- born host country populations, world immigrants have declined in “quality” over time—at least as judged by the way host country markets value their labor. Adding to the rising demand for emigration, the population pool of the most mobile young adults increased as poor countries started the long process of economic modernization. Every country passes through a Finance & Development September 2006 23 ©International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution to history. But to truly understand world mass migration—and closely the total European emigration pattern. After the mid- what might lie ahead—it is not enough to look at only the past 1880s, significant numbers of emigrants also went to South few decades. We must assess the present relative to a past that America, primarily Argentina and Brazil, and to Canada after stretches back over two centuries. the turn of the century. Another stream linked the United Kingdom to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Still, The first wave between 1906 and 1910, the United States absorbed 64 per- The discovery of the Americas stimulated a steady stream of cent of all emigration to the Americas (the main competitor voluntary migration from Europe. High transport costs and big being Argentina, which took in 17 percent). risks ensured that only the richest and most fearless made the Important migrations also took place within Europe. move. Furthermore, distance mattered: the longer the move, Spurred by the first industrial revolution, the Irish migration the bigger the cost, and the greater the positive selection. These into Britain yielded an Irish-born share of almost 9 percent in voluntary migrants, however, were dwarfed by those who came British cities by 1851. In the 1890s, more than half of all Italian under contract and coercion. About 11.3 million journeyed to emigrants went to European destinations, chiefly to France the New World before 1820, of whom 8.7 million were African and Germany. A third example is offered by the movement slaves. Another large European emigrant group consisted of from eastern Europe to Germany, and from east Germany to indentured servants and convicts, whose migration costs were west, patterns repeated even today. As the cost of migration financed by others. Thus, coercion and contracts were the chief from rural Europe to the gateway cities of the U.S. east coast means by which the labor-scarce New World recruited workers fell, return migration soared. The U.S. authorities estimated before the 19th century. that, between 1890 and 1914, return migration amounted to However, once started, the transition to free migration— 30 percent of the gross inflow. which marks a decisive shift in the history of intercontinen- How large were these mass migrations for the sending and tal migration—was spectacular: the share of free migrants in receiving countries? Rates exceeding 50 per 1,000 each decade the total jumped from 20 percent in the 1820s to 80 percent were common for Britain, Ireland, and Norway throughout by the 1840s. The combination of incentives, constraints, the late 19th century, and for Italy, Portugal, and Spain by the and policies that underlie the transition speak directly to the end of the century. The lower rates achieved by other coun- global migrations of today. tries are still high by modern standards. New World immi- In the first three decades after 1846, the numbers of emigration rates were even larger than the European emigration grants averaged about 300,000 a year; they more than doubled rates, an inevitable arithmetic consequence of the fact that the in the next two decades; and, after the turn of the century, sending populations were bigger than the receiving popula- they rose to over a million a year (see chart). Their countries tions. In every New World country except Brazil, immigration of origin also changed dramatically. In the first half of the rates far exceeded 50 per 1,000 in the decade of the 1900s. century, emigrants came predominantly from the richer parts Migration rates of this size imply significant economic effects of Europe—the British Isles, followed by Germany. By mid- on sending and receiving labor markets. This is especially so century, they were joined by a rising tide of Scandinavian and when we recognize that migrations tended to self-select those other northwestern European emigrants and, in the 1880s, by who had most to gain from the move, namely young adult southern and eastern Europeans. males. Thus, the migrants had far higher labor participation The overwhelming majority of these emigrants headed for rates than did either the populations they left or the ones they the Americas, the United States in particular. U.S. immigration joined. It follows that the labor migration rates were even higher from 1846 until the imposition of quotas in the 1920s follows than the already-high population migration rates. Williamson What was the resulting foreign-born share of Europe’s and the New World’s population in the late 19th century? On the go Just before World War I, the highest foreign-born shares were for Argentina and New Zealand, about 30 percent, The number of European emigrants rose from 300,000 a year in while the share was 14.7 percent for the biggest immigrant 1846 to over a million a year by the end of the century, before economy, the United States (see Table 1). These proportions plummeting with the U.S. imposition of quotas. are considerably higher than today, with migrant stocks (five-year average; thousands) now much more evenly spread around the greater Atlantic 1,600 economy (Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, 1,400 Total Europe 1,200 and South Africa). And Western Europe and Latin America 1,000 are changing roles. 800 600 The mass emigration life cycle 400 Southern and eastern Europe 200 Most of the 60 million Europeans who emigrated to the New 0 World in the century after 1820 did so to escape poverty, and 1846–50 1861–65 1876–80 1891–95 1904–10 1921–24 they did it without government assistance or guest worker Source: I. Ferenczi and W.F. Willcox, 1929, International Migrations, Vol. 1 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research). status. Famine and revolution may have helped push the first great mass migration in the 1840s, but it was the underlying 24 Finance & Development September 2006 ©International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution economic and demographic fundamentals that made each The emigrant life cycle implies that the source and quality of subsequent surge bigger than the previous one. If our only immigrants change over time. The spread of the transport and purpose were to explain why so many Europeans emigrated industrial revolutions, which reduced the cost of long-distance in the first global century, this essay would be very short moves and the ratio of migration cost to annual income at indeed: after all, living standards were a lot higher in labor- home, extended the reach of global migration. More potential scarce host countries. emigrants from the hinterland of western Europe and from But why did emigrating countries typically trace out a life distant parts of eastern and southern Europe could make the cycle pattern? That is, emigration rates typically rose steeply move. Thus, migrant origins shifted toward the countries that from low levels as economic development took place in poor came late to modern economic growth.

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