The Citizenship Advantage: Immigrant Socioeconomic Attainment across Generations in the Age of Mass Migration

PWP-CCPR-2016-044

Abstract

Scholars who study immigrant economic progress often point to the success of Europeans who entered in the early 20th century and draw inferences about whether today’s immigrants will follow a similar trajectory. However, little is known about the mechanisms that allowed for European upward advancement. This article begins to fill this gap by analyzing how naturalization policies affected the economic prospects of immigrants across generations. Specifically, I create a new panel dataset that follows children in the 1920 census to when they were participating in the labor force in the 1940 census. I find that naturalization raised the occupational success for the first generation that then allowed children to have greater educational attainment and labor market success. I argue that economic success was conditioned by political statuses for European-origin groups during the first half of the twentieth century – a mechanism previously missed by contemporary research.