Occupational Change at Arrival

Abstract The research of a generation of economic and social historians has given us considerable insight into the occupational mobility experienced in the United States by immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth century. This work has shown that upward occupational mobility was infrequent during the careers of first-generation immigrants in the United States: no more than a third of immigrants who began their careers in the United States as unskilled workers in cities as different as Newburyport, Boston, Poughkeepsie, and South Bend were able to rise into the ranks of skilled or white collar workers, even after several decades in the United States. This poor performance seems inconsistent with the belief expressed by many immigrants that the United States was a place where economic advancement—particularly occupational mobility—was likely. This apparent paradox may result from a censoring problem in these studies: they examine immigrants’ U.S. occupations using sources such as the U.S. census, city directories, and local tax records, while immigrants were probably least likely to be enumerated in such sources in their first years in the United States. As a result, these studies may miss a great deal of occupational mobility if mobility was most likely in the first years after arrival. Even if occupational mobility was genuinely infrequent among recent arrivals, immigrants’ optimism may have been justified if some of those observed as white collar, skilled workers, or farmers in the United States had been unskilled workers before they left Europe. To see whether either of these is the case, we need to know how immigrants’ postmigration occupations changed as their time in the United States increased, and how their premigration and postmigration occupations compared.