EMIGRATION

International migration was a major feature of the history of Europe in the long nineteenth century. More than 50 million people left Europe for overseas destinations and another 10 million left European Russia for Siberia. Similar numbers left other continents. The effect of this movement was a major redistribution of the European population. In 1815, for example, only about 4 percent of people of European origin lived outside Europe (or Siberia). By 1914, that number had

increased to 21 percent, and it continued to rise through the next century. There were also as many emigrants from the rest of the world, and in some respects emigration rates in this period were higher than those of the early twenty-first century. For example, in 1914 a larger proportion of the world's population lived in a different country than the one in which they were born than is the case in 2005. (This is partly because of the growth of restrictions.)

There are many reasons why emigrants left Europe. Some of these—for example, German sects or British Mormons—left because of religious persecution and often established religious communities in the New World. Some left to escape military service, for example in the Austro-Hungarian army. Some—for example, Jews in Russian Poland—left to escape deadly persecution. Some were resettled by landlords anxious to develop their land, as in the case of the Scottish Highlanders. Some were transported criminals, especially to Australia. And finally, some left to escape famine, of which the Irish Potato Famine of 1846–1848 was by far the most important.

The main reason, however, why international migration was so high was economic—what is now called globalization. Emigration rates were relatively low in the early nineteenth century but increased in the second half as transport costs fell and as international trade and capital mobility increased. The key effect of globalization on emigration was that it linked Europe with economies that were resource abundant and labor scarce. Earnings in these countries were much higher than in Europe, which, in comparison, was labor

abundant and resource scarce. Hence both labor (emigrants) and capital (investment) flowed to the so-called regions of recent settlement—the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina.

dimensions and character of european emigration

There are some data problems, particularly those concerning the definition of "emigrant," but the main dimensions of European emigration are clear. Table 1 shows that about 52 million people left Europe for overseas destinations between 1830, when sufficient data are available, and 1914. More than half of these emigrants came from only three countries: 22 percent (11.5 million) from Britain, 19 percent (10 million) from Italy, and 13 percent (7 million) from Ireland.

The emigrants went to a relatively limited number of destinations. Table 2 shows that virtually all the European emigrants went to only five countries: 61 percent (33 million) to the United States; nearly 10 percent (5 million) went to each of Canada, Argentina, and Brazil; and 7 percent (4 million) went to Australia. Only a tiny number of European emigrants went to the nonwhite colonies.

Finally, table 3 shows which European countries produced proportionately the greatest number of emigrants. It is based on the mean emigration rates of the highest four decades. This is a little arbitrary because the eastern European countries had very high emigration rates but only at the end of the period, when emigration was curtailed by World War I. Table 3 shows that Ireland had the highest emigration rate, followed by Norway, Italy, Britain, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. The Netherlands, Belgium, and France had very low emigration rates.

Why was emigration low from many poor countries and high from several rich countries? This is best explained by considering the way an emigration stream developed. Most emigration was governed by the economic benefits of migration and the costs of achieving them. Initially, most people were too poor to emigrate. The cost of travel and the income forgone before they found employment in another country was too high. Moreover, by definition, there were few previous emigrants to help them. (This is why the Finnish famine of 1816 led to little emigration compared with the Irish famine thirty years later.) But as the European economies grew, potential emigrants were richer; transport became cheaper, and crucially, information became more abundant. (Because growth was related to urbanization, one consequence was that more emigrants came from urban areas.) Unsurprisingly, European emigration spread from west to east. In the early nineteenth century, Britain and Ireland experienced large-scale emigration. Emigration then spread to Germany (i.e., the German states), Scandinavia, and Italy. By the early twentieth century it had spread to Hungary, Poland, and the Balkans. There was a relationship between the onset of large-scale emigration and the extent to which an economy was integrated into the international economy. (This was not a sufficient condition, however. Several developed western European countries had little emigration.)

The majority of emigrants traveled individually or as part of a family. Group emigration was largely confined to the early years. And relatively few traveled with a subsidy. Hence a decision to emigrate may be characterized as an individual (or family) decision that compares future income (widely defined) if he or she stayed at home with future income if he or she migrated, taking account of the costs of moving. Annual emigration rates from several countries have been related to economic variables (such as employment and wage differences), which confirm that economic motives dominated the decision to emigrate.

The "relative income" explanation has to be modified in two important respects. The first is that

it does not account for the very large fluctuations in annual emigration rates. Obviously the long-run benefits of emigration were much the same if an emigrant decided to leave in one year rather than another. But annual emigration rates could fluctuate by plus- or minus-50 percent—in other words, much more than could be predicted by differences in the emigrant's expected lifetime income. This was mainly because emigrants could not afford to be out of the labor market for very long. The emigrant had to get to the port, find a passage, and crucially, find employment once he or she arrived. Overall this could take three months or even more when emigrants traveled by sail. If job prospects were poor, emigration would be too risky. An important observation follows: the fluctuations in annual emigration rates were common to all countries experiencing emigration at the time, and they conform to economic conditions in the destination countries. The key peaks were in 1854, 1873, 1883, 1907, and 1913. This means that information about economic conditions in the destination countries must have been available to most potential emigrants.

The second problem is that emigration rates from different European regions varied considerably. Emigration rates from the Italian regions of Calabria, the Abruzzi, and Sicily, for example, were eight to ten times those from Emilia-Romagna and Sardinia. Other famous emigration regions

include Cornwall (England), Berslagen (Norway), Galicia (Spain), Vaasa (Finland), and Galicia and the Bukovina (Austria-Hungary). A common explanation is path dependency. The fluctuations reveal that most potential emigrants must have been in possession of good-quality information. The two most important sources were emigrant letters to relatives and the experience of emigrants who had returned. Another important implication follows: in the main, the letter writers and the returned emigrants cannot have been emigrants who had "failed," since their experience would have had a negative influence on potential emigrants, which clearly it did not.

Remittances from earlier emigrants were helpful, although there is not enough data to say precisely how important these monies were. Remittances were used to help maintain family members left in Europe, thus creating communities that depended on emigration. Some were used to finance the emigration of family members, sometimes by sending prepaid tickets. Hence the cost of travel was often paid out of money that was earned overseas where wages were higher than in Europe.

Emigration from particular regions was partly path dependent. It is impossible to calculate precisely how far information and remittances determined the migration flow because it is impossible to measure the information flow independently of the emigration itself. Emigration in one year makes emigration in the following year easier. This means, of course, that those explanations of emigration rates that depend on the amount of information flowing back to Europe are essentially circular.

emigration to the new world: "old" versus "new" immigrants

The character of European emigration underwent major changes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. An increasing proportion of European emigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. At the same time, there was a marked increase in the rate of return. By the early twentieth century, 40 to 50 percent of Italian and 30 to 40 percent of Polish, Portuguese, and Hungarian emigrants were returning permanently to Europe. (The average for all countries for the whole period was 33 percent, mainly after 1870. It was only 10 percent before 1870.)

The increase in returns was largely because transport became cheaper, safer, and more comfortable. After the mid-1870s virtually all emigrants traveled by rail and steamship, and eventually it became possible to purchase through-tickets from inland Europe to New World destinations. Better transport changed the nature of the emigration decision. Because it became easier to return, the decision to leave became less final, reducing the psychological cost. Most important, cheaper transport made it possible to emigrate for a limited period. In other words, cheaper transport increased the number of "target earners," some of whom emigrated more than once.

This led to an important political issue, particularly in the United States. By the late nineteenth century the main source of immigrants had shifted from western and northern Europe, particularly Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, to southern and eastern Europe, particularly Italy, Russian Poland, Croatia, and Hungary. The former were called "old" immigrants and the latter "new" immigrants. A commission of the U.S. Senate (1907–1911) examined the differences between old and new and concluded that the latter had been of less economic value to the economy than the former. Based on this assessment, immigration in the 1920s from southern and eastern Europe was restricted far more than immigration from western and northern Europe. In effect, the argument was about assimilation. The old immigrants (described as "settlers") were likely to have arrived as part of a family group. Many had become farmers. The later new immigrants (described, pejoratively, as "labor migrants") were likely to have arrived as young single adults and were at least three times more likely to return to Europe than the earlier immigrants. U.S. society at the time was seen as a melting pot where all immigrants ultimately became homogeneous "Americans." (Some immigrants were invisible, however. For example, the British in the United States and Australia were not normally thought of as immigrants.) But the new immigrants, who were concentrated in ethnic ghettos, were very visible and less assimilated.

The differentiation between relatively desirable old and relatively undesirable new immigrants does not bear economic scrutiny. The contribution of the new immigrants reflected changes in the U.S. economy. When the old immigrants arrived in the first half of the century, return to Europe (by sailing ship) was difficult. Hence most emigrants were settlers. Moreover, cheap or even free land was available. By the later nineteenth century, western expansion was over. The demand for labor was in industry and urban services, which created an entry for a new kind of immigrant. In other words, labor migrants were exactly what the U.S. economy needed, although not everybody appreciated this at the time. The importance of assimilation was also misunderstood. For example, the ethnic ghetto was seen as an extension of Europe, which the immigrants had to leave before they could make a major contribution to the economy. In fact, it was a socially heterogeneous and economically vibrant community that was led by immigrant entrepreneurs.

In the main, the new immigrants were assumed to be unskilled and the old immigrants to have been skilled. The former is true but the latter is not. For example, most emigrants to the United States from Britain and Ireland were unskilled. Emigrants were usually a sample of the population. Hence a large proportion of British emigrants were unskilled (urban) workers, and a large proportion of Italian emigrants were peasants.

It has already been noted that emigration rates from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were exceptionally high. This turns out not to be because southern and eastern Europeans were more prone to emigration than northerners but because they would emigrate even when the economic benefit was relatively low. It was simply that wages in southern and eastern Europe were so low and returns to emigration were so high. Real wages in Italy in 1870 were only 23 percent of those in the United States, for example, and the gap did not significantly narrow before 1914.

It is likely that the only way emigrants were systematically selected was with respect to their age. For example, it is frequently stated that emigrants were relatively more "enterprising" than nonmigrants. But this cannot be tested because, for example, the opportunity to become a successful entrepreneur in a resource-rich open economy, such as the United States in the nineteenth century, was particularly high. Hence the success of immigrant entrepreneurs does not tell us if the immigrants were the more "enterprising" people in the European populations from which they were drawn.

The effect of age selection was important, however. Emigrants were typically young adults because emigration involved an investment decision. The benefits were higher the longer the future lifetime. In addition, emigration took place at key moments in the life cycle—for example, when a young person decided to leave home. The point was that young adult immigrants were a free gift of capital. They entered the labor market at the peak of their earning power and when their education and upbringing had been borne by the European economy. Moreover, if they returned home, the immigrants reduced the dependent population. For example, 76 percent of the immigrants into the U.S. economy (1860–1910) were in the prime age groups (15–40), compared with only 36 percent of the American-born. This increased the proportion of young adults in the U.S. population from 36 percent to 42 percent.

The stylized facts about the effect of immigration on New World labor markets before World War I is that, on average, immigrant earnings were initially less than native, holding skills constant, but that they caught up with native earnings within a lifetime. One reason that immigrant earnings were initially lower was that immigrant qualifications were relatively undervalued. This included informal qualifications and, of course, ability in the native language.

economic impacts

In the fifty years before World War I there were few restrictions on the movement of capital, goods, and labor—that is, few restrictions as long as the immigrants were white. In the 1920s two Swedish economists, Eli Filip Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, produced a simple formulation of the effect of European emigration. The New World had relatively abundant resources and relatively scarce labor, which is true by definition. Europe had the opposite. Hence labor flowed to the high-wage, labor-scarce economy. But this should also have meant that capital (overseas investment) flowed to the low-wage economy because investment was more profitable. The implication of the Heckscher-Ohlin model is that the gap between earnings in Europe and earnings in the immigration countries should have narrowed. Table 4 shows real earnings according to the main migration flows: the first line shows that British real earnings were 60 percent of U.S. real earnings in 1870 and 62 percent in 1910, the second that real earnings in Germany were 50 percent of U.S. real earnings in 1870 and 51 percent in 1910. In other words, despite forty years of heavy emigration, no wage convergence had occurred between Britain and the United States and Canada, nor between Germany and Italy and the United States. It is not surprising that high rates of emigration continued for such a long time.

The reason why the earnings gap did not fall was that both earnings and the returns on investment were higher in the New World. Capital and labor were moving in the same, not opposite, directions. This was partly because the cost of resources, particularly in the United States, was very low compared with that in Europe. Access to raw materials was a major factor in production costs at the time, in contrast to the early twenty-first century when transport costs are much lower.

Most important, the United States had developed resource-intensive technologies (in steel and chemicals, for example) that could not be transferred to Europe. Hence the profitability of investment remained higher in the United States than in Europe. (Further, the United States had developed the management techniques to operate these large-scale "business corporations.") Real wages in the United States and other destinations remained higher than in Europe. Rather than falling, emigration rates from Europe increased in the early twentieth century. They only fell because of World War I, which was followed by serious restrictions on European immigration into many countries and the collapse of the international economy, which confirms the connection between trade, capital movements, and emigration.

See alsoColonies; Immigration.

bibliography

Baines, Dudley. Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Bodnar, John E. The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America. Bloomington, Ind., 1985.

Hatton, Timothy J., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. New York, 1998.

Mitchell, B. R. European Historical Statistics, 1750–1975. 2nd rev. ed. London, 1980.

Wilcox, Walter F., and Imre Ferenczi. International Migrations. Edited on behalf of the National Bureau of Economic Research. New York, 1929.

Dudleybaines