The Economic Benefits of Citizenship Acquisition in the Early Twentieth Century United States

• In Event: 20412 - New Methods & Data in Inequality Research

Abstract

For more than a hundred years, citizenship has played a critical role in shaping the economic outcomes of immigrants in the United States. While existing research highlights the occupational advantages of citizenship, such studies suffer from issues of selection. Do people have more successful trajectories due to citizenship, or do motivated individuals pursue both citizenship and occupational success? To help address this selection problem, we leverage a novel historical dataset consisting of individuals who declare their intent to naturalize, the first step toward naturalization in the early twentieth century. We construct a longitudinal dataset that links naturalization records from New York City’s Southern District in the early 1900s with full-count U.S. Census data from 1920, 1930, and 1940, tracking 1,947 immigrants who declared their intent to naturalize and analyzing occupational trajectories and socioeconomic integration among them. Our findings reveal that immigrants who completed the naturalization process attained significantly higher occupational status than those who initiated but did not complete naturalization. Regression analyses with individual and year-fixed effects confirm that citizenship provided a distinct advantage, with naturalized individuals securing better economic positions over time. These results underscore the role of naturalization as a key driver of socioeconomic mobility while highlighting citizenship as a critical stratifying force in shaping long-term occupational trajectories and inequalities among early twentieth-century immigrant populations. This paper will also explore heterogeneous effects across demographic subgroups and examine place-based institutional mechanisms that shape immigrants’ occupational trajectories.

Authors

• Peter Catron, University of Washington

• Nathan I Hoffmann, Emory University

• Mingze Li, University of Washington