I examine the US-born labor market impacts of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, America’s first significant immigration restriction that prohibited entry to Chinese laborers. Using linked Census data for over two million US workers, I find US-born workers exposed to the Chinese exclusion had lower occupational income in 1900, with effects strongest for low-skilled workers. I provide evidence suggesting low-skilled US- born workers likely benefited from the low-skilled labor shortage through higher wages in the short-run, but this led to lower human capital investment and occupational stagnation in the long-run.

• Paper (most recent version)  

• University of Melbourne FBE Working Paper No. 2053 

• 'The Conversation' article 

The Quota Acts of the early 1920s severely restricted European immigration to the United States and effectively ended the 'Age of Mass Migration' that saw over 30 million Europeans migrate to America. Using newly constructed data and novel identification, this paper analyzes the economic impact of this mass emigration and subsequent restriction on local sending regions in Southern and Eastern Europe. I obtain town-level emigration rates for the entirety of Europe from administrative records covering the universe of male European migrants who entered through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924, over 6.6 million individuals. I propose a contagion instrument that uses epidemiological modeling to predict the spread of migration from early emigration locations. I find that emigration had a large positive impact on economic growth on sending regions, likely driven by migrants returning with savings and increased human capital that facilitated industrialization. Simulating counterfactual unrestricted migration with the epidemiological model, I estimate the Quota Acts resulted in a 10.6% reduction in GDP per capita by 1938. 

• Paper (available upon request)

How does the exclusion of specific immigrant groups impact social attitudes towards other immigrant groups? We analyze this question in the context of a series of major US immigration restrictions from 1882 to 1934, which transformed immigration policy from open borders to strict gate-keeping. Using a large, newly processed corpus of over 200 million newspaper pages from 15,000 local outlets, we track the evolution of mainstream sentiment towards different immigrant groups. We find that the restriction of a group does not reduce overall anti-immigrant sentiment, but rather shifts threat perceptions and narratives to other, unrestricted groups. In particular, the 1924 quotas imposed against Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans led to a substantial increase in the threat perception of Mexican immigrants. 

• Paper (available upon request)

This paper examines how ethnic restaurants influence mainstream sentiment towards the immigrant groups. Leveraging one of the first restaurant booms in the US, the 'chop suey craze' of the early twentieth century, we investigate how the spread of Chinese restaurants impacted local attitudes towards Chinese immigrants during a period of intense anti-Chinese sentiment. Using historical press data to measure local sentiment and exploiting variation in the timing of Chinese restaurant openings, we find restaurants had a large and persistent positive effect on attitudes towards Chinese immigrants. The opening of Chinese laundries, on the other hand, had no significant impact on local sentiment, despite similar  interaction and labor market competition with the US-born community as restaurants. We instead provide evidence in favor of a 'cultural bridging’ mechanism whereby restaurants helped to reduce the socio-cultural distance of the Chinese-American community.

• Paper (available upon request)