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Emigration from the United Kingdom to the United States: 1860–1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Lowell E. Gallaway  and
Richard K. Vedder
Lowell E. Gallaway
Affiliation:
Ohio University
Richard K. Vedder
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Extract

Between the years 1860 and 1913 approximately twelve million people took passage from the United Kingdom to extra-European countries. The bulk of the migration stream (about 125,000 people per year) was directed toward the United States; it is this movement of population that is the subject of our article. The flow of individuals from the United Kingdom to the United States in this period ranged from 38,000 in 1861 to 202,000 in 1887 with marked cyclical fluctuations. For example, in 1873 the flow was 167,000 and by 1877 it was only 45,000. Variations of this magnitude pose the interesting intellectual question of whether or not they can be explained. This is not a new question; there are frequent references in the literature to the possible causes of this movement and the emigration from the United Kingdom that it implies. Studies focus on various economic influences on emigration. There is little in this period in the socio-political environment of the United Kingdom that would prompt individuals to emigrate in order to flee intolerable religious or political persecution.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 885 - 897
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1971

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References

1 Mitchell, B. R. and Deane, Phyllis, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 50Google Scholar. The data refer to passengers from United Kingdom ports to extra-European countries and, thus, would include individuals who were temporarily leaving the United Kingdom intending to return. However, encompassed within this statistic are the permanent emigration flows to the United States of America, British North America, Australia, and British South Africa.

2 On the average, 57 percent of the total outflow of citizens of the United Kingdom to non-European areas between 1860 and 1913 was to the United States.

3 For some standard works dealing in whole or in part with British emigration to the United States see Berthoff, R. F., British Immigrants in Industrial America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Easterlin, Richard A., “Influences in European Overseas Emigration before World War I,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, IX (April 1961), pp. 331–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, S. C., Emigration from the United Kingdom to North America, 1763–1912 (London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1913)Google Scholar; Shepperson, W. S., British Emigration to North America (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Wilkinson, Maurice, ‘European Migration to the United States: An Econometric Analysis of Aggregate Labor Supply and Demand,’ Review of Economics and Statistics, LII (Aug. 1970), pp. 272–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 “It may be said that before 1800 the motives for emigration were religious and political rather than economic …. During the nineteenth century the picture was reverse: economic and social conditions were the major determining motives.” Friedlander, Heinrich and Oser, Jacob, Economic History of Modern Europe (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1953), p. 188Google Scholar.

5 Clapham, J. H. C., An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930–1938), II, 233Google Scholar.

6 Jerome, Harry, Migration and Business Cycles (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1926), p. 208Google Scholar.

7 Thomas, Dorothy S., Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Movements, 1750–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 169Google Scholar.

8 Kuznets, Simon and Rubin, Ernest, Immigration and the Foreign Bom (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1954)Google Scholar; Easterlin, “Influences …”; Fleisher, Belton, “Some Economic Aspects of Puerto Rican Migration to the United States,” Review of Economics and Statistics, XLV (Aug. 1963), pp. 245–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kelley, Allen G., “Internal Migration and Economic Growth, Australia, 1865–1935,” THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, XXV (Sept. 1965), 333–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Fleisher, Ibid.

10 Thomas, Brinley, Migration and Economic Growth (Cambridge: National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 1954), p. 93Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 277.

12 This review of the “push-pull” controversy is not meant to be exhaustive. Two other recent studies that find evidence of a “push” as well as a “pull” effect are Pope, David, “Empire Migration to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,” Australian Economic Papers, VII (Dec. 1968), 167–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Chapin, Gene L., Vedder, Richard K., and Gallaway, Lowell E., “The Determinants of. Migration to South Africa, 1950–1967,” South African Journal of Economics, XXXVIII (Dec. 1970), 374–81Google Scholar.

13 For a summary of these positions, see Raimon, Robert L., “Interstate Migration and Wage Theory,” Review of Economics and Statistics, XLIV (Nov. 1962), 428–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For example, see Raimon, Ibid.

15 For excellent discussions of the role of “search” costs in the labor market see Stigler, George J., “The Economics of Information,” Journal of Political Economy, LXIX (June 1961), 213–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Information in the Labor Market,” Journal of Political Economy, LXX (Oct. 1962), Part II, 94–105Google Scholar.

16 The distinction between different types of lags is well articulated in Kelley, “Internal Migration….”

17 Deane and Mitchell, p. 50. A case could be made that American statistics detailing the number of emigrants from the United Kingdom to the United States should be used. However, these statistics are less complete than desired, particularly in the case of United Kingdom immigrants. A major shortcoming of these data is that they exclude cabin and first class passengers. The bias this could introduce might be substantial since United Kingdom immigrants were relatively wealthy as immigrants go. In fact, in the period 1899–1910 the amount of money brought into the United States by arriving English migrants was $78.07 per immigrant on. the average, more than for any other nationality group except the French; the average for all arriving immigrants was $28.95. See Reports of- the Immigration Commission, Vol. Ill, pp. 349–61 for statistics pertaining to the financial condition of immigrants into the United States.

It also might be argued that the data do not adequately depict emigration from the United Kingdom to the United States as they include individuals leaving the United Kingdom on a non-permanent basis. Our inclination is to think that the bulk of this flow consists of permanent emigrants. We base this on certain other data sources. In particular, data describing net movements out of the United Kingdom to extra-European countries are available from 1876 and these indicate that net emigration from the United Kingdom was almost 60 percent as large as the total number of passengers out of the United Kingdom during the period 1876–1913. Thus, allowing for re-migration of people who felt they were permanent emigrants when they left the United Kingdom, it appears that a very substantial portion of the outmovement was true emigration. For some details on the extent of re-migration, see Berthoff, p. 10.

18 These are presented in E. H. Phelps Brown (with Browne, Margaret H.), A Century of Pay (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968), Appendix 3, p. 444Google Scholar. The precise series used are indices of wage earnings in composite units of consumables with 1890–1899 = 100.

19 Deane and Mitchell, pp. 64–65. The series used is a two-year moving average of the unemployment rate for all trade unions making returns.

20 The values in parentheses beneath the regression coefficients are their standard errors. D-W denotes the Durbin-Watson statistic for testing for the presence of serial correlation.

21 Following Kelley, we also estimated our regression equations using the reciprocal of the United Kingdom unemployment rate in place of the rate itself. The results were decidedly poorer with this formulation.

22 The possibility that the emigration to other countries variables are significant collectively can be tested by evaluating the statistical significance of the difference between the R2's with the variables excluded and with them included. This difference is not significant at accepted levels of significance.

23 Wilkinson, “European Migration …”; Kelley, “Internal Migration ….”

24 Jerome, Migration ….

25 Koyck, L. M., Distributed Lags and Investment Analysis (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1954)Google Scholar.

26 An examination of the zero-order correlation matrix for the variables that have been employed indicates that there are no serious problems of multi-colinearity in the analysis.

27 This suspicion is confirmed when a more sophisticated test for serial correlation in regressions incorporating distributed lag terms is applied. The test is suggested by Durbin, J., “Testing for Serial Correlation in Least Squares Regression When Some of the Regressbrs are Lagged Independent Variables,” Econometrica, XXXVIII (May 1970), 410–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The suggested test indicates between a 90 and 95 percent probability of negative serial correlation ip the distributed lag regression we estimated.

28 Griliches, Zvi, “A Note on Serial Correlation Bias in Estimates of Distributed Lags,” Econometrica, XXIX (Jan. 1961), 65–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.