Keeling on Hatton and Williamson, _Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (June 2007)

Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, _Global Migration and 
the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance_. 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. xi + 471 pp. $50 (cloth), ISBN: 
0-262-08342-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Drew Keeling, Department of History, 
University of Zurich.


For decades, scholars of modern cross-border migration and its 
history have noted the desirability of broad comparative 
perspectives, as frameworks for more numerous studies of particular 
locales and ethnicities. In recent years, economists have led 
development of a "big picture" approach to the history of 
international migration, and Jeffrey Williamson and Timothy Hatton 
have been at the forefront of those economists.

_Global Migration and the World Economy_, the latest and most 
exhaustive joint study of this duo, builds on their prior work 
together and independently, but also breaks important new ground. For 
instance, most of this new book is not duplicated either in their 
_Age of Mass Migration_ (1998) or in Williamson and Kevin O'Rourke's 
collaboration, _Globalization and History_ (1999).

The book is divided into four sections by time period: the nineteenth 
century rise of global migration, the early twentieth century fall, 
the late twentieth century "rise again," and a final section 
examining contemporary migration trends and future alternatives. Ten 
of eighteen chapters concern the period since 1914, and among the 
book's strengths are its many insightful comparisons between the post 
World War II period and the "first global century" that ended with 
World War I.

Using an impressive combination of original theory, statistics, and 
logic, and incorporating a broad array of findings from other 
scholars, the authors dissect the economic fundamentals underlying 
international mass migration. They deploy their multi-pronged 
analysis across the vicissitudes of the modern migratory age: through 
shifts in origin countries, the transformation from industry to 
services in destination country economies, the growing importance of 
asylum-seeking and illegal migration, and the emergence of policy 
regimes that have become more restrictive, more sophisticated, and 
more difficult to effectively administer. A solid historical 
perspective informs a thorough examination of contemporary issues: 
from the importance and limitations of immigration regulations in 
shaping the magnitudes and character of migration, to democratic 
disconnections between public opinion and public policies on 
migration, to the complex offsets and feedbacks between education and 
mobility, skilled and unskilled labor, and the "brain drain" and 
remittances. _Global Migration and the World Economy_ is chock full 
of precise and salient questions, and takes at least a stab at most 
of them, although it is often a challenge for the reader to keep 
track of which among a shifting multitude of open issues is being 
addressed, or where it has already been addressed.

A tour de force summation of economic history literature on migration 
will make this an excellent reference source for future researchers. 
The coverage is particularly thorough on recent publications, through 
about 2004, which lends this volume an impressive "cutting edge" 
character, but also makes its conclusions tentative in a number of 
places. This suggests the possibility of an eventual second edition, 
which would also provide an opportunity to correct ambiguities in a 
few of the otherwise generally helpful "supply and demand" graphs or 
"box diagrams" and to redress overstatements such as "the labor 
market effect of immigration has always been the key focus in debate 
over immigration policy." That remark, on page 289, is difficult to 
reconcile with the finding, on page 359, that "prejudice against 
those of a different race and culture is the most important influence 
on attitudes towards immigrants."

The topical coverage is very wide, although less so than the title 
might suggest. Migration's overlaps with international trade are 
treated more extensively, for instance, than its impacts on economic 
growth or its interactions with demographic and environmental 
factors. A more functionally descriptive title might be "the economic 
causes and consequences of global migration since 1815," and in that 
important category this significant book has few peers, if any.

While an impressive work overall, some parts of _Global Migration_ 
are problematic. The authors appropriately stress the importance of 
labor markets, which have been underappreciated in most of the 
migration historiography, but apply an incomplete corrective. They 
say little about labor demand, stressing labor supply instead, and 
attributing even more significance to factors exogenous to labor 
markets (such as travel costs, famines, wars, and government 
policies). At the core of their historical explanation for "what 
drove migration" is a model in which potential migrants in poorer 
countries are stuck in a "poverty trap" until they can find a way to 
"escape" it, with the help of higher wages, government subsidies, 
foreign remittances or lower ticket prices. Undoubtedly, relocation 
costs have always been a consideration in long-distance cross-border 
migration decisions, and were, in general, a more serious constraint 
the further back in time one looks, but the Hatton and Williamson 
model imputes to them a centrality beyond that established by their 
data. Rising wages across the nineteenth-century Atlantic basin 
lowered the real costs of travel, new travel technologies reduced 
travel times, the sources of Europe's overseas emigrants shifted 
southward and eastward to regions more remote from New World 
destinations, and there was a long term secular shift towards lower 
average labor market "skills" amongst transatlantic migrants. All of 
this is consistent with a declining cost barrier to migration. But 
how big a role did that barrier play to begin with, at the outset of 
the "first global century," e. g. circa 1830? The truth is, no one 
seems to really know for sure yet, including Hatton and Williamson. 
There is no model here explicitly assessing the relative importance 
of factors, including travel affordability, which distinguished 
stayers from leavers, there is no clear distinction between wanting 
to migrate and being able to migrate, and the cost data presented are 
quite incomplete.

The authors' claim that "during the great transition from trickle to 
flood, it was the decline in steerage rates and in the time in 
passage that mattered most," but there are at least two problems with 
this theory as they present it. Firstly, most nineteenth century 
overseas migrants left from Europe, most of those European emigrants 
moved to the United States, and the all-time peak in U.S. immigration 
relative to population was in the early 1850s, a time when very few 
migrants yet reached America on the steamships which cut oceanic 
travel times by two thirds or more. Steamships did not take more 
steerage passengers to the U.S. than sailing ships until 1865. 
Secondly, the supporting passage cost data presented in _Global 
Migration_ do not include most available sources of such figures, 
such as the fares compiled by Kristian Hvidt (1971) or Arnold Kludas 
(1986) showing an increase in North Atlantic transit fares after 1900 
that coincides with an even sharper rise to the second highest 
all-time peak in the U.S. immigration rate.

Hatton and Williamson deal authoritatively with the expected net 
benefits of migration, but have little to say about how the variance 
and uncertainties of such net benefits also have been important to 
voluntary international migrants. Uncertainties and fears -- of mass 
amnesty, or of millions forced to live outside the law -- have played 
a role in recent U.S. immigration policy debates. Long-distance 
transnational migration itself has long and rightly been regarded as 
a great gamble. Smuggled migrants crossing Arizona's deserts or the 
waters between Africa and Europe clearly confront substantial risks. 
Risk considerations have been convincingly suggested as contributing 
factors to past mass migration trends, such as the record high rate 
of Irish emigration in the early 1850s, for example, or the strong 
and persistent drop in German emigration after 1890. The causal role 
of pitfalls and anxieties, about leaving or staying or both, receive 
little attention in this book, however.

The discussion on pre-World War I economic "convergence" between 
immigrant-sending and immigrant-receiving countries is not entirely 
clear-cut. Williamson's path-breaking international real wage 
comparison data set, gathered in the early 1990s and focused on 
1870-1913, apparently still lacks coverage of two immigrant source 
countries which were major contributors to the massive migration 
"peak" of 1900-1913, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Many of the 
convergence examples actually cited, moreover, are comparisons within 
Europe rather than between Europe and the New World. This important 
distinction is often blurred.

The authors nonetheless do make a persuasive case (for the nineteenth 
century and today) that chain migration, demographic transitions, 
travel costs relative to source incomes, and government policies are 
more significant than wage gaps in "driving" migration, but that 
international labor market migration, if sufficiently massive, has 
generally reduced global economic inequality between poor and rich 
countries. This migration-induced convergence has tended to come at 
the cost of rising inequality within richer destination countries, 
however. Subject to some notable distinctions and qualifications, the 
authors also reach similar conclusions regarding "south-to-south" 
migration, e.g. movement between less-developed countries.

The chapter on the early twentieth century "backlash" against 
immigration suffers from a conflation of attitudes and intentions (on 
the one hand) with effective policies (on the other). Based on a 
model quantifying "policy stance" rather than "policy impact," 
_Global Migration_ plausibly indicates that "labor market 
fundamentals," e.g. the negative effect of immigration on wages of 
the native-born were, after all, more important than xenophobia or 
racism in producing a gradual shift in favor of restricting European 
migration to the New World by the early twentieth century. Contrary 
to the assertions in this chapter, however, (although not the 
immediately following chapter on the impacts of the" backlash") the 
decade 1915-24 saw dramatic changes in the policies actually adopted 
in the U.S., the destination of most transatlantic migrants in the 
century before World War I.

On the eve of that war, gradually increasing exclusion of limited 
categories of arriving Europeans had raised the debarment rate at 
U.S. entry ports to a still near negligible 2%. During the war, in 
contrast, U.S. immigration dropped by over 75%. The 1920s quota laws 
which soon followed were explicitly and successfully designed to 
eliminate most of the influx from Southern and Eastern Europe which 
had accounted for a large majority of the 15 million American 
immigrants of 1894-1914. As the authors rightly observe, American 
immigration quotas were largely redundant during the Great Depression 
and World War II, but nonetheless did have major restrictive effects 
in the 1920s and 1950s. The shifting constellations of political 
party strategies and interest groups which enabled significant 
fulfillment of growing popular sentiment against immigration to the 
U.S. by the 1920s, but not before, was chronicled in John Higham's 
_Strangers in the Land_ half a century ago. It remains a useful study 
still today, but is not mentioned in _Global Migration_. The 
counterfactual question of whether -- absent the world wars, the 
1930s depression, and the U.S. quotas -- immigration from Europe 
might have dwindled anyway after 1920, is one of many examples of 
provocative and interesting issues raised by the book, but not 
resolved, due to unavoidable space limitations.

Hatton and Williamson do not, however, duck complicated and 
controversial concerns about labor migration negatively affecting 
native employment and wage levels. In several different historical 
contexts, they unravel the often indirect ways this occurs (such as 
inflows of foreigners helping to stimulate regional relocations of 
natives). Nonetheless, the authors also make a convincing case that 
the net overall effect of cross-border migration has tended to be 
economically beneficial: not just for migrants but also for the 
countries they move out of and into.

The potential receptivity of contemporary policymakers and 
opinion-shapers to these judicious conclusions is another matter. The 
authors' stated desire to reach that set of audiences might have been 
more effectively served had there been a bit more attention devoted 
to how labor migrants import language, culture, ideas, and so forth, 
along with their job skills. Migrants come for work, but then often 
also become neighbors, taxpayers, users of public services, parents 
of school children, citizens and voters, and these developments, in 
turn, have economic impacts well beyond the fiscal impacts (which are 
treated authoritatively here). The cogent final section, on 
contemporary policy issues, has much to recommend it, but it is 
questionable how much of the preceding 340 pages policy formulators 
might read en route to it. Complex historical insights and practical 
politics do not mix easily in any case, however.

A more avoidable shortcoming is the relative absence of questions 
addressed by migration historians. This book is loaded with material 
casting doubt upon non-economic historians' often implicit 
assumptions that narrow slices of the migration picture suffice to 
illuminate the whole. But, the argument for the big picture rather 
than the narrow case study is never quite engaged.

Scholarship from outside of economic history but addressing migration 
history broadly is also given little weight. One cannot expect a book 
of this scope to cover all bases, but not mentioning Markus Hansen, 
Philip Taylor or Daniel Tichenor, for example, somewhere in four 
hundred pages suggests a lost opportunity. Dirk Hoerder's nine 
hundred page _Cultures in Contact_, published in 2002, has several 
references to Wallerstein, but none to Williamson, or Hatton. _Global 
Migration and the World Economy_ talks at some length about 
Heckscher, but makes no mention of Hoerder. This divergence of 
History and Economics is undoubtedly yielding gains from 
specialization, but also implies unrealized potential gains from 
trade. A better appreciation of the inherently interdisciplinary and 
historical nature of this deeply personal and interpersonal, 
psychological, cultural, and even biological phenomenon would enrich 
models and analyses built around economic aggregates. A firmer and 
more nuanced understanding of migration's economic fundamentals, and 
a greater awareness of their central role, would enhance historians' 
investigations of international human relocation.

Historians should read _Global Migration and the World Economy_, 
because sooner or later, they are likely to be called upon to more 
directly confront some of the crucial issues it raises. An 
interconnected world of demographic challenges, resource limitations 
and increasing climate disruptions, for example, is going to be a 
world where cross-border mass migration will be about much more than 
ethnic identities, culturally diffusing diasporas, or even elegantly 
contingent narratives. Even if -- as Hatton and Williamson 
realistically conclude -- the historical record offers no "easy 
solutions to the world migration problems" of the near future, it 
seems a reasonably safe bet that coming global migration challenges, 
whatever else they do, will also stoke desires for geographically 
broad historical insights.

Notwithstanding its unevenness, and sometimes overstated conclusions, 
the sweep and incisive power of this book make it likely to remain a 
point of reference for years to come. It will probably receive more 
attention within the fields of economics and economic history than 
outside of them, but the long run prospects for interdisciplinary 
"convergence" on the causes and effects of global migration are 
improved by this ambitious and far-reaching scholarly contribution.


Drew Keeling received his Ph.D. in History from the University of 
California, Berkeley in 2005, and is now an instructor in the History 
Department at the University of Zurich. His dissertation, "The 
Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the USA, 
1900-1914" was awarded the 2005 Gerschenkron Prize of the Economic 
History Association. Two related publications are forthcoming later 
this year: "Costs, Risks, and Migration Networks between Europe and 
the United States, 1900-1914," in _Research in Maritime History_, and 
"Transport Capacity Management and Transatlantic Migration, 
1900-1914," in _Research in Economic History_.

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