This essay reviews Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. This elegantly written book, whih is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic of immigration, walks the reader through a history of US immigration, examining patterns of immigrant assimilation from the mid-nineteenth century to today. The book challenges two myths about US immigration. First, it shows that historical European immigrants did not always arrive poor and quickly climb the economic and social ladder. Second, it documents that the pace of immigrant assimilation today resembles that prevailing at the turn of the twentieth century.

In this article, I jointly investigate the political and the economic effects of immigration, and study the causes of anti-immigrant sentiments. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants’ location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. I find that immigration triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower redistribution. Exploring the causes of natives’ backlash, I document that immigration increased natives’ employment, spurred industrial production, and did not generate losses even among natives working in highly exposed sectors. These findings suggest that opposition to immigration was unlikely to have economic roots. Instead, I provide evidence that natives’ political discontent was increasing in the cultural differences between immigrants and natives. Results in this article indicate that, even when diversity is economically beneficial, it may nonetheless be socially hard to manage.

We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash, increasing support for anti-immigrant parties and lowering preferences for redistribution and diversity among natives. Next, we unpack the channels behind the political effects of immigration, distinguishing between economic and noneconomic forces. In examining the mechanisms, we highlight important mediating factors, such as misperceptions, the media, and the conditions under which intergroup contact occurs. We also outline promising avenues for future research.

In this paper, we study the effects of economic integration with democratic partners on democracy. We assemble a large country-level panel dataset from 1960 to 2015, and exploit improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation to derive a time-varying instrument for economic integration. We find that economic integration with democracies increases countries’ democracy scores, whereas the impact of economic integration with non-democracies is muted. Results are stronger when democratic partners have a longer history of democracy, grow faster, spend more on public goods, are culturally closer, and export higher quality goods. The effects we document are driven by imports, rather than exports, and by integration with democratic partners that account for a larger share of a country’s trade in institutionally intensive, cultural, and consumer goods, as well as in goods that involve more face-to-face interactions and entail higher levels of bilateral trust. These patterns are consistent with economic integration favouring the transmission of democracy by signalling the (actual or perceived) desirability of democratic institutions. Alternative mechanisms—including human capital accumulation and economic growth—cannot, alone, explain our findings.

Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the US, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This article shows that the Great Migration and support for civil rights are causally linked. Predicting Black inflows with a shift-share instrument, we find that the Great Migration raised support for the Democratic Party, increased Congress members’ propensity to promote civil rights legislation, and encouraged pro-civil rights activism outside the US South. We provide different pieces of evidence that support for civil rights was not confined to the Black electorate but was also shared by segments of the white population.

This paper documents that the Pearl Harbor attack triggered a sharp increase in volunteer enlistment rates of American men, the magnitude of the increase was smaller for Black men than for White men and the Black–White gap was larger in counties with higher levels of racial discrimination. The results suggest that political exclusion and discrimination can undermine support for the government during critical times such as war.

How does the arrival of a new minority group affect the social acceptance and outcomes of existing minorities? We study this question in the context of the First Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1930, 1.5 million African Americans moved from the U.S. South to Northern urban centres, which were home to millions of European immigrants arrived in previous decades. We formalize and empirically test the hypothesis that the inflows of Black Americans changed perceptions of outgroup distance among native-born whites, reducing the barriers to the social integration of European immigrants. Predicting Black in-migration with a version of the shift-share instrument, we find that immigrants living in areas that received more Black migrants experienced higher assimilation along a range of outcomes, such as naturalization rates and intermarriages with native-born spouses. Evidence from the historical press and patterns of heterogeneity across immigrant nationalities provide additional support to the role of shifting perceptions of the white majority.

How did Southern whites respond to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA)? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration by race between 1956 and 1980 and exploiting predetermined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we document that the VRA increases both Black and white political participation. Consistent with the VRA triggering white countermobilization, the surge in white registrations is concentrated in counties where African Americans represent a political threat. Countermobilization leads to a short-run increase in support for racially conservative candidates and to a slowdown in local public spending salient to Black Americans, such as public-sector employment and education.