Since the Civil War, two towering waves of immigrants have defined American demographics. The first came from Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s: the Ellis Island era. The second, which continues today, started in 1965 with sweeping changes in immigration law that welcomed people from around the globe, particularly Latin America and Asia.
In American mythology, the (largely White) huddled masses of the Ellis Island era teemed to our shores, tamed the prairies, powered the Industrial Revolution and became the heroes of the American success story. Today’s (largely non-White) immigrants are portrayed somewhat less charitably, often as people who came without marketable skills, looking for a handout.
Now, thousands of genealogists, toiling anonymously, have shattered that myth and upended our perception of American immigrants. No spoilers, but the data shows that the current wave of immigrants is succeeding and assimilating at virtually the same rate as immigrants did a century ago.
“The Mexicans today are just as upwardly mobile as the English and Norwegians of the past,” Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky told us.
With Leah Boustan, now of Princeton University, Abramitzky is helping to change the way we look at American immigrants during a 14-year effort to follow Americans across generations by linking together their records in one of humanity’s greatest data troves: old decennial census files.
Seventy-two years after each census, the government releases every sheet of data collected by enumerators in a single, magnificent data dump. But for decades, that was more or less the end of it. Piles of magnificent data dumps sat slowly decaying in government warehouses and data centers.
It took pioneering researchers such as Northwestern University’s Joseph Ferrie years of tedious searching to link even a couple thousand people across multiple censuses in the 678 million records now available.
Enter the genealogists. Boustan and Abramitzky realized that, line by line, granduncle by granduncle, folks at genealogy sites such as Ancestry and FamilySearch, many of them devoted amateurs, had quietly built the Taj Mahal of economic data: digital copies of early censuses.
To access that data, all the economists had to do was break into the Taj Mahal.
There were some early setbacks. When they wrote a program to automatically download hundreds of thousands of records from Ancestry, Abramitzky said, they got a call from an inquisitive corporate lawyer. The company had noticed their activity and surmised that either they had an improbably huge family tree or they were trying to raid the company’s data and launch a competitor. (An Ancestry spokesperson said the company has no knowledge of this interaction.)
But Abramitzky’s enthusiasm for immigration research is highly infectious. Within minutes, the corporate lawyer was entranced by their findings and firing off questions about how generations of Italians and other nationalities had moved up in the New World.
Thus began a long working relationship that quietly transformed economic research.