Does initial wealth explain persistent inequality across immigrant groups?
Core argument: By 1920, 50% of white adults were foreign-born or had foreign-born parents, yet Southern and Eastern European descendants achieved wealth.
Inferring the determinants of long-run inequality from group-level data is complicated by the arrival of 30 million Europeans during the Age of Mass Migration (roughly 1850 to 1924), who are by construction included in average white wealth despite having no direct claim to the wealth accumulated by earlier Americans. By1920, nearly half of white adults were either foreign-born or had foreign-born parents. Using the United States Immigration Commission Reports (commonly known as the Dillingham Commission Reports), I document that immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century arrived with almost no wealth. [Thus] a large share of the white population started from a substantial wealth disadvantage. Northwestern Europeans comprised the overwhelming majority of earlier immigrants, dating back to the initial European settlement of North America, while Southern and Eastern Europeans predominated at the turn of the twentieth century. If initial wealth disadvantages persisted across generations, one would expect households of Southern or Eastern European ancestry to possess less wealth than those of Northwestern European ancestry, since their families arrived later and started with substantially fewer resources. In fact, they do not. On average, they are wealthier.