The Impact of Immigration on Natives in the Antebellum U.S. Labor Market, 1850-60

A negative effect of immigration on natives' wages or incomes has been difficult to detect over the last 25 years. Such an impact has been observed at the turn of the century, however. This difference could result either from a genuine change in the impact of immigration or from differences across studies in the impact and treatment of the location decisions of immigrants and the internal migration of natives. This study is prompted by these differences. It measures the impact of immigration in the years before the Civil War, in a setting in which it should be possible to detect an impact if ever there was one: the analysis covers a period when the immigration rate was more than twice as great as in the modern period, controls for immigrants' location decisions, and examines both out-migrants and non-migrants among the native born. It finds that the impact of immigration on the income of natives was limited to skilled workers in the urban northeast. The largest impact on this group came from unskilled Irish immigrants. Though the results are not encouraging to those who seek a large impact from immigration today, they help explain both the reluctance of the United States to impose restrictions on immigrant entry in this period and some important political developments leading up to the Civil War.