I didn't read the entire paper. But since is it does seem to be based on naming, did it also address the changing naming conventions of the time? Because early 20th century is also when people stopped taking their fathers name as a family name.
American society so far has demonstrated a tendency to alternate between mass migrations coming in from abroad, and mass internal migrations.
The last great internal migration was the 1940’s to 1970’s as cars and highways became widespread.
The period of mass migration from abroad coming in happens in the mid 70’s with significant events being Vietnamese refugees in 1975 and Iranian refugees in 1979. The end of the Cold War meant the stopping of US support to many anti-communist dictators which also increased these numbers. I believe though it was a change in the immigration law in 1965 that made this possible, which reversed the quotas put in place in the mid 1920’s and established family unification as a priority.
With that all being said though, it seems that mass migration from abroad has become more controlversial in the US, and perhaps we are entering the next great age of internal migrations.
Actually, American geographical mobility has declined significantly in the last twenty years with little end in sight. Obviously there are multiple factors but the significant difficulty of renting and finding a job in most place has to be one significant part.
This article talks about the consequences but that there has been a decline is a given.
> Periods of mass external migration into the US also depress wages
Empirically, this is not the case, at least in the long term[1]:
> Empirical research in recent decades suggests that [...] when measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small.
(This is from a 2017 overview. The next few pages starting after the linked passage summarize the currently known evidence, if you're interested.)
Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent.
Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.
Borjas's results consistently lie at the furthest extreme of existing studies. You can see this in the survey I linked. If I claim that the aggregate of research doesn't show a long-term effect of immigration on wages, it's not a rebuttal to cite a subset of data from one tail of the distribution.
Less abstractly, Borjas's methods are viewed as suspect by other economists working in this area. See, e.g, this review[1].
Don't forget that some industries can't exist if there aren't enough workers. Density of human capital is sometimes a prerequisite to a sustainable business.
For example, silicon valley would be much smaller and the net value of companies much lower if not for the global inflow of talent. Even if the average wage was reduced (and I doubt it, I think it's only likely for commodity labour, scale enables specialization which pays more) the total wage is much higher. You also need to look at the displacement effect - what happened to jobs with other sets of skills that now have fewer workers.
This is such a disgusting neoliberalism lie I’m unsure how to react.
There is nothing in the world to suggest that MORE workers would RAISE wages. I’m not saying it doesn’t add benefits, American tech companies built a lot of cool stuff with cheap H1-B but it does LOWER salaries.
I don't agree that a period of mass migration is on the horizon at all. There are serious material roadblocks to any such thing. You can't just point to a historical wave and ignore material factors. There's no indications that high rent, barriers to easily finding jobs and so-forth are going to go away any time soon.
Is a very interesting way to put it. The Hart-Cellar act was decidedly about removing racialized immigration policy that was based upon the eugenics movement [1], it’s passage comes amid civil rights legislation.
Indeed there are internal U.S. migrations taking place — over 10% of the U.S African American population left the southern states over the first half of the 20th century, the affordability of and relatively less overt oppression in the current U.S. south are driving a return [2].
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