Municipal Reform and the Socioeconomic Integration of Immigrants

• In Event: Historical Political Economy

Abstract

How did Progressive era reforms affect the social and economic fortunes of immigrant communities in U.S. cities? The historical record is unclear. Some scholars point out that reformers often sought to improve urban living and working conditions and expand access to education, which generated new opportunities for economic advancement for immigrant residents. Others argue that many of the progressive reforms adopted by cities were explicitly designed to reduce the political power and participation of these groups, which may have had negative socioeconomic consequences. We take advantage of deanonymized census data from 1900 to 1940 to contribute to this debate by examining how economic conditions evolved over time for immigrant communities across 559 U.S. cities. We use the adoption of reform-style government as a proxy for Progressive power and use a series of difference-in-differences designs to document how immigrants fared compared to native-born residents in terms of six standard measures of socioeconomic integration: employment status, wage earnings, occupational prestige, occupational segregation, literacy, and school attendance. Across each outcome, we find little evidence that the choice to reform either helped or hurt immigrant communities disproportionately. This approach provides one of the most comprehensive accounts to date as to whether and how municipal political institutions matter for social and economic inequality.

Authors

• Maria Carreri, University of California Berkeley

• Julia Payson, New York University

• Daniel Thompson, UCLA