American History and Immigration

Immigration in American Economic History.

The United States has long been perceived as a land of opportunity for immigrants. Yet, both in the past and today, US natives have expressed concern that immigrants fail to integrate into US society and lower wages for existing workers. This paper reviews the literatures on historical and contemporary migrant flows, yielding new insights on migrant selection, assimilation of immigrants into US...

Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs

How many "American jobs" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector version of the Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) model with a continuum of tasks in each sector and we...

Immigration and the American century.

The full impact of immigration on American society is obscured in policy and academic analyses that focus on the short-term problems of immigrant adjustment. With a longer-term perspective, which includes the socioeconomic roles of the children of immigrants, immigration appears as one of the defining characteristics of twentieth-century America. Major waves of immigration create population div...

Hispanic American Immigration: Challenges and Opportunities

Brief History of Immigration to the U.S. Hispanic1 immigration to the United States started with Columbus’ rediscovery of the continent on October 12, 1492. The first post Columbus settlements in current U.S. territory were highly religious communities. A bull by Pope Alexander VI (1493) ordered the partitioning of America and summoned early Spanish immigrants “to instruct the inhabitants in th...

Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity