Today's labor-scarce economies have open trade and closed immigration policies, while a century ago they had just the opposite, open immigration and closed trade policies. Why the inverse policy correlation, and why has it persisted for almost two centuries? This paper seeks answers to this dual...

The number of refugees worldwide is now 12 million, up from 3 million in the early 1970s. And the number seeking asylum in the developed world increased tenfold, from about 50,000 per annum to half a million over the same period. Governments and international agencies have grappled with the twin...

Can history shed light on the modern debate about immigration%u2019s labor market impact in high wage economies? This paper examines the relationship between migration and capital flows in the age of mass migration before 1914, the so-called first global century. It then assesses the effects of...

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low-wage sending regions (directly augmenting the supply of potential movers as well as indirectly making already-measured...

This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current...

The 1920s marked the end of a century of mass migration from Europe to the New World. This paper examines analytically this pre-quota experience. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first deals with the character and dimensions of overseas emigration from Europe chiefly from the mid...

This paper examines the determinants of overseas mass migration from eleven European countries in the late 19th century. They typically passed through something like a half-century life-cycle: a steep rise in emigration rates from low levels in preindustrial decades, followed by a plateau of...

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publicly-subsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced...

As part of a process that has been at work since 1850, real wages among the current OECD countries converged during the late 19th century. The convergence was pronounced as that which we have seen in the post World War Il period. This paper uses computable general equilibrium models to isolate...

The United States has experienced rising immigration levels and changing source since the 1950s. The changes in source have been attributed to the 1965 Amendments to the Immigration Act that abolished country-quotas and replaced them with a system that emphasized family reunification. Some...