TY - JOUR
T1 - Class Background, Reception Context, and Intergenerational Mobility
T2 - A Record Linkage and Surname Analysis of the Children of Irish Immigrants
AU - Connor, Dylan Shane
N1 - Funding Information:
This article has benefited from conversations and feedback from Leah Boustan, Michael Storper, Peter Catron, Jamie Goodwin-White, Roger Waldinger, David Rigby, Robert Mare, Dora Costa, Myron Gutmann, Steve Ruggles, Alan Fernihough, Cormac Ó Gráda, and participants at the UCLA-Science Po migration workshop in Berlin; the UCLA Economic History Proseminar; the All-UC Graduate Student Workshop at UC Davis; the Conference of Irish Studies in New York; and the meeting of the Social Science History Association in Montreal. I would also like to thank Jamie Winders (International Migration Review editor) and three anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful suggestions and feedback. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Travelling Studentship from the National University of Ireland.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2018.
PY - 2020/3/1
Y1 - 2020/3/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1177/0197918318806891
DO - 10.1177/0197918318806891
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85059878270
VL - 54
SP - 4
EP - 34
JO - International Migration Review
JF - International Migration Review
SN - 0197-9183
IS - 1
ER -