ABSTRACT
Why should today’s policymakers concern themselves with history? In the case of international migration, the answer is straightforward: the late nineteenth century, and more precisely the period between the Irish Famine of 1845-49 and the First World War, was an era of free migration. As such, it constitutes a unique policy experiment. In earlier epochs, emigration had often been constrained, either in an attempt to prevent skilled workers from transferring technology overseas, or in an attempt to prop up land rents by preventing cheap labor from moving elsewhere. For example, in comparatively liberal Britain, skilled workers were forbidden to emigrate in 1719, a restriction which was only removed in 1825. In the twentieth century, it was immigration that was restricted, by governments anxious to avoid downward pressure on wages or upward pressure on unemployment. A symbol of this shift is the decision of the U.S. Congress in 1917 to override President Wilson’s veto of the immigrant literacy test, a move that was to be followed by a progressive tightening of restrictions in the world’s most popular destination for would-be emigrants. Simultaneously, other New World countries such as Canada and Argentina were imposing immigration barriers of their own; European countries, once a major source of emigrants, would eventually move to curb immigration as well. In 2001, 21 out of 48 developed country governments had policies designed to reduce immigration, while only two had policies designed to raise it (UN 2002a, Table 3, p. 18).
