Mexican immigrants in '20s tended to be wealthy

The Statue of Liberty bears these words about immigrants: ‘Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.’ In the 1920s, immigrants from Mexico tended to be wealthier, healthier and taller than Mexicans who did not come here, researchers find, adding that their probe could shed light on how immigration would change with different immigration policies

U.S.-Mexico border manifests from the 1920s indicate that Mexicans migrating to the United States then tended to be healthier, wealthier and more productive than those who did not migrate, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Edward Kosack, a Ph.D. candidate in CU-Boulder’s Department of Economics, and Zachary Ward, a CU alumnus who now lectures at The Australian National University, recently published research suggesting that U.S. migration policy in the early 1900s led to “positively selected” Mexican migrants. The work was published late last year in the Journal of Economic History.

In other words, the policies created an environment that drew “economically strong” Mexicans to migrate to the United States.

Mexican immigration was not always the hot-button issue it is today. In 1920, American laws targeted and limited European, but not Mexican, immigration.

“The only limits on Mexican immigrants were literacy requirements and a head tax,” Kosack says.

What would migrant selection in a world with few barriers look like? We couldn’t answer this question today, because this world doesn’t exist”

Given the legal differences between 1920 and today, Kosack and Ward believe the border manifests offer insights into the effects of an open-door immigration policy that no longer exists.

Despite the few legal restrictions, the cost of migration was fairly high at that time, so migrants had to be relatively prosperous.

Kosack and Ward’s paper explores what kind of immigrants came from Mexico during this era. Their premise was that Mexicans who migrated were of “higher quality”—i.e. had better education, productivity and health than other Mexicans who did not migrate.

But, “the problem with economic history is that the data isn’t good,” Ward says. Because they didn’t have data on wages, they had to find a different way to measure overall “economic quality” of Mexican migrants.

So they looked at height, “which is positively correlated with better health and nutrition,” Kosack explains.

Taller people also tend to earn more than their shorter counterparts within a country. The taller people are, the more likely they are to be educated, healthy, productive and relatively wealthy compared to their counterparts, Kosack says.

Looking at border crossing manifests from 1920, Ward and Kosack wanted to know whether those crossing the border were taller than the Mexicans who stayed in Mexico. They found that those who migrated to the United States tended to be significantly taller than Mexicans who did not migrate, confirming that Mexico’s “cream of the crop” undertook migration.

Although immigration is a contentious issue, Kosack thinks the general public understands that “the qualities needed to undertake migration are ambition and adventurousness.”

On the other hand, Ward says Americans often assume that Mexicans migrate only because they were economically unsuccessful in Mexico.

“They assume the migrant population must be negatively selected,” Ward says. Even though there is a disparity between the two countries’ economies, “it’s a mistake for Americans to compare themselves to Mexican immigrants in terms of economic quality,” he concludes.

Ward and Kosack also used the border manifests to see which migrants from 1920 were more likely to return to Mexico later that decade.

“People think it’s a one-way street, but a really sizeable immigrant population goes home, especially Mexican immigrants,” Ward says.

Contradictory findings from other economists indicate that from 1900 to 1920 competition in the United States caused return migrants to be “negatively selected”—meaning that those who couldn’t make it economically in Mexico, those “lower quality” migrants, were also unsuccessful in the United States, whereas “high quality” migrants tended stay in the United States and enjoy success.

If this were true, Ward says, “we would expect to find shorter people went back home, but we found return migrants and permanent residents were the same height.”

Kosack and Ward’s findings suggest that Mexicans did not return simply because they couldn’t make it. Instead, they think the return migration of those documented in the manifests could be explained by pressure on Mexicans to go home on their own, especially at the end of the 1920s and the start of the Great Depression.

After World War I, American political opinion about immigration changed, Ward explains. While The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 and The Immigration Act of 1924 did not explicitly target Mexican migrants, they are two examples of legislation that reflected “nativist sentiment leading to a huge backlash against immigrants,” Kosack says.

Because of this, he and Ward are interested in the policy implications of their data.

“What would migrant selection in a world with few barriers look like? We couldn’t answer this question today, because this world doesn’t exist,” Kosack says.

But the border manifests of the 1920s paint a picture of how migration looked when there was more of an open-door policy—and how it might look if there ever were another one.

“We can look back and have a little bit of an insight into what would happen,” Ward says.

Additionally, Kosack and Ward are interested in how 1920s migration is still impacting modern-day migration. Migration networks and family connections between the United States and Mexico have strengthened since the 20th century.

Because migrants today have more connections than the migrants of the 1920s, Kosack and Ward suggest some of the traits once necessary for migration may not be as crucial for successful migration today.

“It’s possible that these networks compensate for and aid in the successful migration of people with less money and education,” Ward says.

Lara Herrington Watson is a CU alumna (’07) and freelance writer who splits her time between Denver and Phoenix.