While there’s a lot of recent discussion about the impact of immigration, Americans often overlook the effects of emigration.
Norman Douglas traveled extensively in southern Italy during the early 1900s and wrote a book entitled Old Calabria. At one point he discussed how emigration was transforming Italy, which at the time was quite poor:
What is shattering family life is the speculative spirit born of emigration. A continual coming and going; two-thirds of the adolescent and adult male population are at this moment in Argentina or the United States—some as far afield as New Zealand. Men who formerly reckoned in sous now talk of thousands of francs; parental authority over boys is relaxed, and the girls, ever quick to grasp the advantages of money, lose all discipline and steadiness. . . .
These emigrants generally stay away three or four years at a stretch, and then return, spend their money, and go out again to make more. Others remain for longer periods, coming back with huge incomes—twenty to a hundred francs a day. . . .It is nothing short of a social revolution, depopulating the country of its most laborious elements. 788,000 emigrants left in one year alone (1906); in the province of Basilicata the exodus exceeds the birthrate. I do not know the percentage of those who depart never to return, but it must be considerable; the land is full of chronic grass-widows.
Things will doubtless right themselves in due course; it stands to reason that in this acute transitional stage the demoralizing effects of the new system should be more apparent than its inevitable benefits. Already these are not unseen; houses are springing up round villages, and the emigrants return home with a disrespect for many of their country’s institutions which, under the circumstances, is neither deplorable nor unjustifiable. A large family of boy-children, once a dire calamity, is now the soundest of investments. Soon after their arrival in America they begin sending home rations of money to their parents; the old farm prospers once more, the daughters receive decent dowries. I know farmers who receive over three pounds a month from their sons in America—all under military age. . . .
Previous to this wholesale emigration, things had come to such a pass that the landed proprietor could procure a labourer at a franc a day, out of which he had to feed and clothe himself; it was little short of slavery. The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own terms for work to be done, wages being trebled. A new type of peasant is being evolved, independent of family, fatherland or traditions—with a sure haven of refuge across the water when life at home becomes intolerable.
When people emigrate to a more successful place, there is a flow of information back to the home country. People learn that things don’t have to be this way, and there is pressure for change. Like trade, migration is not a zero sum game; it tends to improve cultures in both the sending and the receiving country.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Nov 2 2023 at 10:24pm
1: Yes, emigration promotes new flows of information, which can produce salutary changes; score one for Scott Sumner.
2: More simply, the article also observes that emigration changes the local ratio of capital to labor–that is, changes the labor supply.
In The Upswing (2020), Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam tracts the rise, fall, and perhaps rise again of social cohesion in America, from 1890 to about 2017. In particular, he tracks changing statistics about the fate of black people over this time. Did the Jim Crow keep black people in stasis until the civil rights movement took off in the 1960s? Actually, data on relative rates of health, education, earnings and home ownership, and voting/voter registration show the opposite: Black people experience GREATER rates of improvement the population at large until 1960 or 1970. This counter-intuitive conclusion is partially explained by the fact of the Great Migration: Large numbers of black people abandoned the South and moved into northern cities, where they then achieved a northern level of life expectancy, schooling, voting, etc. But this emigration did not merely help those who emigrated. By reducing the southern labor supply and revealing to the bosses that their remaining employees had viable alternatives, those bosses then had to improve wages, hours, and working conditions. As one example, after 1900 the Jim Crow South built an unprecedented number of black schools in an effort to keep their labor force at home.
A somewhat more macabre example can be found in the Black Plague: Since roughly a quarter of the labor force “emigrated” to the next life, the nobility had to put up with increasingly cheeky (and greedy) peasants. That was the result of a lower labor supply.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Nov 3 2023 at 10:26am
And immigration from resource constrained region, should actually raise pc incomes of those remaining.
Bob
Nov 3 2023 at 8:03pm
I do this, in both directions. The part nobody tells the immigrant is that now you have two places you are not at home at: Always a foreigner in America, and then “The American” back home.
Someone like Tyler Cowen will talk about what one gets out of travel, but staying somewhere for 5 days, or 5 weeks, doesn’t teach that much. The real levels of dysfunction are only understood once you live somewhere for years.That’s when the foreigner’s eyes really gain focus, and we cannot hide from the parts that really don’t make sense.
Mactoul
Nov 4 2023 at 2:19am
Isn’t Middle East a counter-example to the easy optimism of emigration’s benefit.
Millions of people from the Middle East have emigrated to the West and this doesn’t seem to have changed the Middle East culture.
Though it has significantly changed the West — free speech is hindered by Islamophobia charges, there are pro- terrorist demonstrations in the great capitals ( even in New York today).
Last year Armenians were hunted in European cities during Armenian-Azeri clash.
This year there were Hindu-Muslim riots in many British towns.
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2023 at 2:04pm
“this doesn’t seem to have changed the Middle East culture.”
Middle Eastern culture has certainly changed dramatically. Why assume that emigration played no role?
Mactoul
Nov 4 2023 at 8:41pm
But has it changed for better? Towards a more liberal direction?
Another counter-example would be students from European colonies going off to France and England to study and picking up communism. And then ruining the home country. Vietnam is the leading example but many African countries fit the scenario as well.
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