The History of American Immigration
The Long Story of Our Fickle Feelings for Foreigners
As part of my ongoing project doing advance research for my upcoming Podcast on the history of American migration, I’ve been putting together various long-term migration datasets. However, it’s impossible to tell the story of American migration without also discussing immigration. Indeed, immigration and domestic migration are closely tied to one another, as I’ve argued before. That’s especially true during our nation’s settlement period in the 19th century.
So that raises the question, just how much immigration is there, and how does it compare to history?
In today’s post, I’m going to take a fairly exhaustive tour of what we know about historic immigration. I’ll skip lots of interesting details in order to focus on a few specific stories. And as you’ll see, we can’t talk about historic immigration without at least some discussion of American identity politics. Which means, yes, I’m going to talk about Donald Trump.
Just the Numbers
Immigration is Sky-High!
Focus on the top line showing all immigration there. It’s super-duper high; 2 to 2.5 million immigrants a year from 1990 to 2006! That estimate is based on several subcomponents. First, we have general legal immigration, as reported by the Department of Homeland Security. I then strip out crisis migrants (asylees and refugees), as that’s a group of particular concern recently. Then I add in a rough estimate of illegal inflows (regardless of the term you prefer for the immigrants themselves, the inflow is definitively illegal: I make no claim here to the “correct” term for people once they’re in the country). That estimate is based on outside estimates from Pew on the total population of such immigrants, as well as extant data on apprehensions at the border. I readily grant that it could be wrong, but I think it’s well within the right ballpark.
Notably, these are gross inflows, not net inflows. For legal migration, emigration is a pretty small share of inflowss. For illegal flows, emigration is a very large share of immigration. So it should be noted that I am measuring gross inflows, not net inflows. I have done work in the past on recent net flows to the United States, but am only focused on the gross here.
From 1780 to 1910, I also have a line called “historical statistics corrections.” If you read the Historical Statistics of the United States, you’ll find that official inflow data before the 1900s was very incomplete, missing tens of thousands of immigrants who came overland, from Canadian or Mexican ports, or who didn’t travel as below-decks passengers. I’ve used a fairly simply imputation method as well as such spotty statistics are available to impute the size of this gap in the data.
From 1780 to 1807, we have data on the legal “importation” of slaves (i.e. forced immigration of enslaved persons). I include this as an inflow. From 1807 to 1860, outside sources suggest probably 250,000 slaves were forced to migrate to the U.S. not only in contravention of their own will, but in violation of U.S. law. I’ve apportioned these 250,000 in a way I thought reasonable, but it’s ultimately a small flow compared to immigration generally.
Finally, even official general immigration data goes kaput before 1820. For 1780–1820 non-enslaved, I use some broad estimates offered in the Historical Statistics of the United States, as well as some outside research on early American history. These numbers are very much “ballpark” estimates.
Based on my estimates, immigration is incredibly high! It’s unprecedented! We’ve never had so many immigrants!
Well, not quite. That’s just the raw number. But population was far lower in the 1800s too. The story changes when we adjust for population.
Immigration Rates Are Near Historic Norms
Adjusting For Population Matters
When we divide immigration flows by the total population, we find that total inflows are near normal historic levels. At about 0.47% in 2013, total legal and illegal immigration is actually below the long-term average of 0.59%. And by the way, emigration from the US is probably higher now than it was in the past, so net migration is likely even lower compared to the historic record.
Legal inflows are exceptionally low compared to the historic norm, while illegal inflows accounted for more than half of all immigration in many of the last 30 years. This can be seen as a kind of analog for the “open door” immigration policies of the 19th century. During the height of illegal inflows, total immigration rates were well above the historic average. Integration of immigrants during the 19th century proved challenging, with suspicion of immigrants lasting for generations, full English-adoption taking many generations, and nativist reactions provoking violence in numerous occasions.
We should keep this in mind as we consider current reactions to immigration. If we assume that anti-immigrant backlash is roughly proportional to the lagged rate of inflows, then we should remember that the rabidly anti-immigrant Know-Nothing or American Party won 21% of the vote in the election of 1856, as well as about 1/5 of the House Seats in the 1854 election. And lookee there, the highest rates of immigration ever occurred in… 1850 to 1854. Some kind of meaningful political backlash seems highly plausible and has certainly not yet occurred, especially given the extremely different legal circumstances. In the 1800s, most immigrants became citizens pretty quickly, and had lots of babies. Today, many immigrants never become citizens, and fertility is much lower, so the pro-immigrant voting block is not as strong.
So how large a share of the population is an immigrant?
Cycles of the Foreign-Born
What Would YOU Call Normal?
Graphs of the foreign-born population by decade back to 1850 are a dime a dozen. So I won’t bore you with the usual decadal u-shape. We all know that story.
Instead, I’ve got this sparkly new graph where I’ve developed annualized foreign-born populations going by to 1780!
First, a methodological note. I annualized the decennial foreign-born populations for 1850–2000 by first extrapolating an annual rate of growth, as I’ve done for total state populations in the past. Then I also adjusted the annual growth rate to reflect annual volatility in immigration rates (I found there’s a stable relationship between foreign-born population growth and total immigration, obviously). This broke up the smooth lines between censuses at least a little bit. For 2000–2013, I use CPS and then ACS data.
Before 1850 is where we have my most heroic assumption. I assume that the annual population growth of the foreign-born is equal to 1/2 the total immigration in a given year. Where do the other half go? Simple: they die or emigrate. However, I’ve included three other specifications in the visualization for you to play with, one where I assume the foreign-born population growth is simply equal to total immigration, and another where I assume the foreign-born population growth is equal to 3/4 of immigration, and another where it’s 1/4 of immigration. As you’ll see, assumptions of low mortality/low emigration rapidly lead to a negative foreign-born population in the back years, which is impossible. We could assume much higher mortality/emigration, but that yields a 1780 population that’s over 40% foreign-born.
What that means, however, is that these early numbers are highly speculative. What is not speculative however is that the foreign-born share did rise rapidly from 1850 to 1870. Indeed, America in 1850 had a smaller foreign-born share of the population than it does today. I tend the think that the foreign share was even lower in the low-immigration 1790s and 1800s, but likely higher in the 1760s-1780s, still benefiting from residual colonial migrations. So I favor my estimate because it just makes sense. But others may favor different estimates.
If you believe my estimates, there’s one big stand-out fact.
There is no “normal” foreign-born share of American population.
I mean, what do you think looks normal? Around 14%, like we had from the 1860s to the 1920s? Or is it around 6%, like we had the the 1810s to 1830s, and again from the 1940s to the 1980s?
All in all, we might say we can spot 5 immigration epochs:
- The Colonial Period- From before my chart to the 1780s, marked by very high foreign-born populations early in settlement, and declining after colonization subsides.
- The Antebellum Period- From the 1780s to the 1850s, marked by low foreign-born population populations, generally at or below 10% of the population.
- The Age of Migration- From the 1850s to 1920, marked by high levels of foreign-born population, around 14% generally.
- The Modern Migration Lull- From the 1920s to the 1980s, with the foreign-born population again below 10%.
- The Second Age of Migration- From the 1980s to the present, we’ve seen high foreign-born population shares.
But wait. That’s the foreign-born population, which is also impacted by emigration and mortality. Plus, it’s lagged, reflecting an accumulation of migration over many previous years. If we want to find periods where immigration was rapidly adding to the foreign born population, we need a different metric.
Inflows Compared to the Foreign-Born
The Amazing 1850s
The below chart shows total immigration by year divided by the foreign-born population in that year. The first standout is the high inflows in the 1850s. It’s possible I have this number too high, as I have added to the baseline DHS estimates due to the incompleteness of official port records. But even with no additions, the 1850s are still remarkably high.
The foreign-born population of probably 1.7 million in 1848 received 3.2 million immigrants over the next 6 years. Of those, roughly half came from Germany and Ireland, and another 1/5 or 1/6 came from the United Kingdom. A large number were Roman Catholic, they brought unfamiliar foods, and both groups brought unfamiliar languages (though the Irish also spoke English). For comparison, during the 1820s, only about 60,000 immigrants arrived from Germany and Ireland together. The period also saw other unfamiliar groups show up: over 30,000 Chinese immigrated during the 1850s, versus less than 20 individuals in the 1830s.
We can also see that, when we compare the inflow rate to the foreign-born population, the late 1980s or early 1990s had the highest rate of inflow since the 1990s. Rates have declined since. Indeed, the rate at which immigration shores up the foreign-born population since the 1990s has declined steadily.
Integration and Politics
Our History Shows the Costs and Benefits of Immigration
The inflows in the 1840s and 1850s amounted to over 2% of annual population per year. Imagine, if you will, the arrival of between 30 and 50 million immigrants over the next 6 years. This would mean immigration would grow by 300% to 500% from its current rates, to between 6 and 8 million people per year. Imagine they speak a different language, have a different religion, come from a place with radically different forms of government, tend to be poor, and they’re associated with foreign terrorist groups. They try and drag us into foreign wars. It is not shocking that nativists resorted to violence and launched successful nation-wide political movements during the 1840s and 1850s. We should rightly deplore the racism, the violence, the illiberal politics, of the nativist movements of the antebellum period.
But! And yes, there’s a but here. It is reasonable to believe that allowing in 40 million immigrants over the next 6 years would cause even many very liberally minded people to react with intolerance. How many of us, no matter how committed we may be to a more open immigration policy, would really have no qualms over welcoming in 7 million immigrants a year from non-democratic countries with ongoing civil wars (as in Germany in the 1850s) and unfamiliar religions? What if they started conducting terrorist or military operations from within our territory? These aren’t hypotheticals: this is what actually happened in the 1840s to 1880s.
And even though we know how this story ends, there’s an open question: was an open immigration policy a smart bet? In hindsight, letting in all those Irish and Germans won the Union the civil war and energized our nation in a remarkable way, fueling our path to greatness, while also giving us an extremely valuable tradition of openness to migration. But maybe we just got lucky. Those concerned about immigration don’t have to be irrational or hateful to believe that we just got lucky the first time around.
Serious advocates of higher levels of immigration (I count myself as one) have to take seriously the possibility of a 21st century Fenian Raids. We have to understand that when Irish immigrants arrived, many opted out of the public schools and set up schools for their own foreign religion, opting out of a firmly-established bedrock of American democratic tradition. Nativists set fire to churches, and in a series of riots, dozens of people were slain and hundreds injured. Even 3 militiamen died in the fighting. Meanwhile, German immigrants were so successful in pressing their cultural norms on Anglo-Americans that we call the year before 1st grade Kindergarten.
I don’t know of any immigration advocate who argues for bringing in 8 million immigrants per year, equivalent to the inflows we experienced in the 1850s. So it’s highly unlikely any new inflows, say of Arabs or Chinese or Indians, would have quite as resounding an effect. Most advocates of higher immigration favor inflows of maybe just between 2 and 3 million at most, rates that would be much easier to assimilate without major changes to our existing cultural and political structures than the rates seen in the 1850s. But we need to take seriously the political and cultural limits of any policy.
Integration and Politics
Our History Shows the Costs and Benefits of Immigration
I debated whether or not to include these last two sections, because I know they’ll will rub many people the wrong way. And I should be clear: I do in fact personally favor higher levels of immigration. At the same time though, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative, sympathetic to the cultural and security concerns of my conservative compatriots. Ultimately, I decided to include these sections for one reason:
Recent debates about immigration have tended towards two extremes: the Know-Nothing-ism of Donald Trump, or hyper-idealistic denialism by immigration advocates.
The truth lies somewhere between.
Current immigration rates are nowhere near the levels that should cause concern about immigrant cultures overwhelming or supplanting existing American cultural norms. Even somewhat higher rates could be sustained without any serious risk.
The United States has experienced much higher immigration rates than at present alongside much larger foreign-born populations, and we not only survived, but thrived.
However, rates at the levels seen in the early 1990s could eventually pose some risk of serious intercultural conflicts if sustained for a long period of time. Those who fear that immigrant cultural norms may overtake existing norms (such as widespread implementation of sharia law) are almost certainly wrong: but if we maintained immigration at, say, 5 or 6 million people per year, they’d be correct sooner than you might think.
And if we returned to our noble American tradition of openness like in the 1850s and welcome in 8 million immigrants a year, the truth is, large swathes of the United States actually would be “speaking Arabic” (or Chinese or Indian languages). Just like large groups in the US in 1850 were speaking German and Gaelic. This isn’t speculative fear-mongering, this is just a sober reading of the data. Now in the historical case, it worked out pretty well in the end. But it’s not clear that result was ever guaranteed, or even particularly likely. It may be that integration only became successful because immigrants were forged into Americans by the fires of the Civil War. Would anyone like to volunteer to start the next civil war as an immigrant integration strategy?
So what can we say about the historical record on immigration? Recent rates of immigration and foreign-born populations are somewhat elevated, but still well below historic highs. Illegal inflows have been an extremely large source of recent immigration, while crisis migrants are a very small share of total immigration, and pose no serious risk of overwhelming local cultural norms. On the other hand, there are very real cultural and political risks accompanying the very high levels of immigration that characterized the United States in the 19th century. Advocates of higher immigration should work to assuage integration-related fears of conservatives, because such fears spring from a basically correct understanding of how immigration worked historically. There are plenty of ways to do this: come up with better rhetorical arguments regarding “how much is too much.” Vigorously support policies that promote integration.
The current round of debate about immigration has been toxic, but not nearly as toxic as it can get, and in fact will get if we follow the historic American precedent. Both those skeptical of immigration, and advocates for higher immigration, would be well-served by fitting their concerns to the actual historical record.
See my previous post, announcing my new Podcast and presenting my recent foray into historical research.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
