| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joseph P. Ferrie. Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States, 1840–1860. (NBER Series on Long-Term Factors in Economic Development.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 223. $49.95.

A generation of historians has pondered the impact of European immigration on American society, on native-born citizens, and on the immigrants themselves. Community-based studies have generally concluded that the arrival of mostly unskilled European laborers depressed wages for native-born workers while offering little upward occupational mobility for immigrants. Economist Joseph P. Ferrie presents a sophisticated statistical portrait of antebellum immigrants to test and refine that pessimistic view for the period 1840–1860. The heart of the study is a sample, drawn from ship lists, of more than 2600 European immigrants, largely from Britain, Germany, and Ireland, who disembarked at New York City during the 1840s. Ferrie linked these immigrants to the U.S. censuses of 1850 and 1860 and compared them to a control group of almost 5,000 natives and immigrants. The chief weakness of community-based studies is their lack of information about immigrants' status and experiences both before and after their usually limited residence within any specific community. Ferrie uses his rich database to transcend these limitations by including evidence of immigrants' occupation at arrival, their occupational and geographical mobility during their first few years in the U.S., and their situation up to twenty years after their arrival. His analysis includes sophisticated controls for a wide range of possible biases, including year of arrival, duration in the U.S., underenumeration in federal and local records, geographical mobility, mortality, and return migration. . . .

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