Socioeconomic Attainment in the Ellis Island Era

Michael J. White, Brown University
Erica J. Mullen, Brown University

This project addresses a gap in the assimilation literature. Contemporary immigrant assimilation theory compares today’s immigrants to Southern and Eastern European immigrants from the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the Ellis Island era), yet the latter group’s socioeconomic assimilation has not been tested empirically with longitudinal data. Using several decades of IPUMS census data, we utilize double cohort methodology and OLS microdata regression to test the “Ellis Island myth” that those who arrived during the Ellis Island era managed quickly to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Our results show that while the first generation (foreign born) exhibit decidedly inferior labor market outcomes, socioeconomic attainment (measured as SEI) increases quickly with duration in the US. Persons of the second generation and those of mixed parentage show much less penalty than immigrants. We uncover differences in outcome by European region that do not disappear over the decades examined.