Publications
Publications
- 2020
- HBS Working Paper Series
From Immigrants to Americans: Race and Assimilation During the Great Migration
By: Vasiliki Fouka, Soumyajit Mazumder and Marco Tabellini
Abstract
How does the appearance of a new minority group affect the social acceptance and outcomes of existing minorities? We study this question in the context of the First Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1930, 1.5 million African Americans moved from the U.S. South to Northern urban centers, which were home to millions of European immigrants arrived in previous decades. We formalize and empirically test the hypothesis that Black inflows changed perceptions of outgroup distance among native-born whites, reducing the barriers to the social integration of European immigrants. Predicting Black in-migration with a version of the shift-share instrument, we find that immigrants living in areas that received more Black migrants experienced higher assimilation along a range of outcomes, such as naturalization rates and intermarriages with native-born spouses. Evidence from the historical press and patterns of heterogeneity across immigrant nationalities provide additional support to the role of shifting perceptions of the white majority.
Keywords
Citation
Fouka, Vasiliki, Soumyajit Mazumder, and Marco Tabellini. "From Immigrants to Americans: Race and Assimilation During the Great Migration." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-018, August 2018. (Revised October 2020. Accepted at Review of Economic Studies. Also appears in VoxEU, The New York Times, Broadstreet and in the Skepticast.)
About The Author
