Young traces the pivotal century of Chinese migration to the Americas, beginning with the 1840s at the start of the 'coolie' trade and ending during World War II. This book is the first transnational history of Chinese migration to the Americas. By focusing on the fluidity and complexity of...

The federal government's efforts to pick and choose among the multitude of immigrants seeking to enter the United States began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Conceived in ignorance and falsely presented to the public, it had undreamt of consequences, and this pattern has been rarely...

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the 19th century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel...

Why were the poorer countries of the European periphery latecomers to the Age of Mass Migration? We test the diffusion hypothesis, which argues that mass emigration was delayed because it was primarily governed by a gradual process of spatial diffusion of migration networks. We propose a model...

The number of individuals forcibly displaced by conflicts has been rising in the past few decades. However, we know little about the dynamics--magnitude, timing, and persistence--of conflict-induced migration in the short run. We use novel high-frequency data to estimate the dynamic migration...