The Quota Acts of the early 1920s, the most substantial immigration restrictions in U.S. history, effectively ended the mass emigration of over 10 million people from Southern and Eastern Europe. This paper evaluates the effect of this restriction on regional economic growth in Southern and Eastern Europe. I extract towns of origin for over 6.6 million European immigrants from Ellis Island records (1892-1924) to construct a new dataset of town-level emigration rates. I leverage the origins of early migrants and the contagion-like spread of emigration for causal identification and counterfactual estimation. I find that emigration prior to restriction had a large positive impact on the economic growth of sending regions and provide evidence suggesting that migrants returned with increased human capital and savings that facilitated industrialization at origin. I estimate that the ‘missing migrants’ caused by the Quota Acts reduced GDP per capita by 14.5% in Southern and Eastern Europe by 1938 relative to the counterfactual unrestricted case.

• Job Market Paper (most recent version)  

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 interwar period marked a dramatic turning point in global economic history, as the unprecedented movement of goods, capital and people across borders prior to World War I, known as the first wave of globalisation, gave way to a sharp rise in trade and migration barriers. In this article, we revisit this historical reversal to shed light on the current political backlash against global integration. We document the trends in trade and migration during the first wave of globalisation, examine the policies that dismantled it, and compare with contemporary trends. We review recent literature on the short- and long-term effects of these policies on workers, industries, and economies. By analysing the protectionist cycles of the past and their impacts, we aim to provide context for understanding today’s retreat from openness and the potential risks it poses.

• Paper (most recent version)  

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 (most recent version)  

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. 

• Slides  (presented at Harvard, Oxford and the CEPR)