Economic Mobility and Geographic Persistence, 1850 –1860

The process of transformation undergone by the immigrants described in the preceding chapters did not end in 1850. Though we have focused on the changes they experienced between arrival and 1850, making use of data from 1860 only where it was necessary to separate the effects of duration in the United States from changes in cohorts over time, a great deal more mobility occurred among these new Americans between 1850 and 1860. In this chapter, we follow their progress over this decade, considering their geographic, occupational, and financial mobility, and the links among these dimensions of their experience. In doing so, we offer a new contribution to an older literature on the economic mobility of not just immigrants but also natives, and the role of geographic mobility in that process.

Demographic economics · Development economics · Economic geography · Economics · Geographic mobility · Geographic variation · Geography · Immigration · Occupational mobility · Persistence (discontinuity) · Population · Social mobility · Social science · Sociology · Demography · Engineering · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy