World mass migration began in the early nineteenth century, when advances in transportation technology and industrial revolutions at home enabled increasing numbers of people to set off for other parts of the globe in search of a better life. Two centuries later, there is no distant African,...

Summary This paper asks whether history can inform modern debate about immigration's impact on high wage economies. It examines the relationship between migration's labor market impact and capital flows before 1914, the first global era. It then assesses the effects of immigration on wages and...

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. Our new estimates of net migration for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa show that exactly the same...

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...

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...

International migration in the last half century is often characterised as following an inexorable upward trend that can only be stemmed by tougher immigration policies in the rich OECD. This view fails to pay sufficient attention to the supply-side forces that drive emigration from poor to rich...