IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucn/wpaper/202121.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

"The Best Country in the World": The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants

Author

Listed:
  • Tyler Anbinder
  • Cormac Ó Gráda
  • Simone Wegge

Abstract

We use databases we have created from the records of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank, founded by pre-Famine Irish immigrants and their children to serve Famine era immigrants, to study the social mobility of bank customers and, by extension, Irish immigrants more generally. We infer that New York’s Famine Irish had a greater range of employment opportunities open to them than perhaps commonly acknowledged, and that the majority were eventually able to move a rung or two up the American socio-economic ladder, supporting the conviction of many Famine immigrants that the U.S. was indeed “the best country in the world.”

Suggested Citation

  • Tyler Anbinder & Cormac Ó Gráda & Simone Wegge, 2021. ""The Best Country in the World": The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants," Working Papers 202121, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:202121
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10197/12562
    File Function: First version, 2021
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Famine; Migration; Ireland; New York;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General
    • N3 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy
    • J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:202121. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Nicolas Clifton (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/educdie.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.