Costs, Cycles and Causes of Migration Across the North Atlantic, 1870-1914

"This paper assesses the relative importance of two potential factors helping to cause increasing European migration to the United States between 1870 and 1914: growing demand for immigrant workers in the fast- developing U.S. economy, and falling costs of travel across the North Atlantic. Steerage fares charged by Britain’s Cunard Line between 1884 and 1913 are the principal basis for measuring changes in travel costs; the pull of the U.S. economy is measured by an adaptation of estimated employment. Migration is measured by second and third class passenger movements. Changes in fares, and in demand for foreign workers, are also looked at as possibly influencing year-to-year fluctuations in migration volumes. The results here show that migration closely tracked short and long term trends in the U.S. economy, especially within cyclically prone employment heavily reliant on immigrant labor. In contrast, travel fares did not change much over the period. Temporary drops in ticket price levels did relatively little to propel migration, which rather tended to also fall during periods of low fares. These results are consistent with other observations. Overall travel costs were already small relative to U.S. earnings by the 1880s. Many more than actually migrated could also have benefitted from doing so, but not unless jobs were available in sufficient numbers."