ABSTRACT
The dramatic decline in US immigration in the 1920s and 1930s is well known. Less well known are its causes and its labor market effects. To the extent that US and other labor markets were integrated internationally, there are questions as to the degree of international migration, its causes, its alterations, and its effects on both observed wage gaps and unemployment. Studies of wage gaps (Alston and Hatton 1991; Hatton and Williamson 1992a) and of interwar unemployment (Eichengreen and Hatton 1988; Margo 1993) give scant attention to the impact of international labor mobility on wage differentials and employment levels. An impact is not unrecognized, but few data are available that readily link domestic labor markets with international migration and even fewer studies have attempted to define such a link empirically. The wide disparity in available estimates suggests that the choice of a measure of labor market integration is also a question. There are further questions: was the restrictionist legislation of the 1920s the cause of the drop in immigration in both the 1920s and the 1930s? How did net international migration compare in level with internal migration? If much of the job loss or job formation occurred in the urban sector, how did immigration or emigration bear on the sectoral labor markets? We know that rural to urban migration was sizable in the interwar decades. Hatton and Williamson, in examining US wage gaps between farm and city, point to real flows of “impressive” magnitude between those sectors, i.e. net farm emigration that averaged 549,000 per year between 1921 and 1941 (Hatton and Williamson 1992a:276). However, those flows reversed in the depths of the Depression as net farm immigration appeared in both 1931 and 1932. They reversed again as a
recovery developed. “Following the trough of the Great Depression, farm emigration surged to World War II, and in 1941 it was higher than at any time during the interwar period” (ibid.). How much did immigration to city and farm add to those numbers? Were international migration flows synchronous over the same time period? From all countries?
