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...