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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.4 (2004) 569-594



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European Immigration to America's Great Basin, 1850-1870

Scott Alan Carson


For more than a generation, historians and economists have painted nineteenth-century American occupational mobility with broad strokes. The experience of international migrants indicates that their nativity and settlement within America significantly influenced the occupational mobility that they encountered. Between 1800 and 1850, many European emigrants opted to emigrate from Sweden and Germany to America's northern central plains. Many nineteenth-century Irish immigrants remained in New England; other Irish immigrants dispersed across the American continent. Still another set of mid-nineteenth- century European emigrants migrated to America's far western frontier. Between 1850 and 1880, a large contingent of mostly British immigrants relocated to America's Great Basin. This article considers the international occupational mobility of this last group of nineteenth-century immigrants, comprised mostly of European Mormon recruits.

Thernstrom found that American upward occupational mobility was infrequent during the early nineteenth-century, at least among first-generation workers in Newburyport. According to Thernstrom, America was not the "Land of Opportunity" so often described by social historians. However, Kamphoefner noted that nineteenth-century Germans encountered a great deal of mobility between their German and American occupations. Swierenga discovered that nineteenth-century Dutch immigrants bound for America's Midwest experienced more downward and less upward mobility than Kamphoefner's German sample. Ferrie's observation that early nineteenth-century European immigrants to the United States underwent considerable occupational mobility is consistent with the labor literature, which shows that immigrant occupational mobility is often fluid shortly after arrival.1 [End Page 569]

White-collar and skilled immigrants left their first occupations more rapidly than farmers and unskilled workers. British and Germans fared better in American labor markets than the Irish. Herscovici's data set of nineteenth-century Newburyport males who remained in the same location suggests that previous studies may have underestimated the extent of economic mobility. Those who left Newburyport were more successful than their counterparts who remained behind. Advantages that accrued to migrants were due, in part, to their success at becoming farmers. Minns uses census data from the 1900 and 1910 Integrated Public Use Manuscripts (ipums) to show that American immigrants experienced considerable occupational mobility into the white-collar sector of the American labor market. Highly skilled immigrants entered the United States as blue-collar workers and moved into white-collar occupations after acquiring American-specific human capital, such as the mastery of the English language. Other studies examine the pre-migration occupations of nineteenth-century immigrants to assess the value of human-capital transfers from source countries to the United States. These broad and narrow geographical studies of nineteenth-century occupational mobility indicate that every American geographical region must be studied for an accurate understanding of nineteenth-century overall American occupational mobility.2 [End Page 570]

America's Great Basin extends eastward from the Sierra Nevadas to the Rocky Mountains. Its internal waterways drain onto desert flats instead of running to the sea. During the nineteenth-century, many unskilled immigrants to the American West chose to remain in the Great Basin and took up low-productivity farming. For many of them, this was a move upward. Their decision to migrate may even have been influenced by perceived opportunities in the Great Basin. European skilled immigrants temporarily abandoned their skills or permanently suppressed their acquired European human capital to migrate into a developing economy where their abilities were not in demand. However, as the Great Basin's market extended, these once-skilled European immigrants may have resumed their original occupations. Great Basin labor markets developed along parallel lines with America's other western labor markets. Small populations and restricted output markets limited the occupations that western labor markets could sustain. Not until the twentieth-century did western labor-market skills begin to converge with those of eastern labor markets. Nevertheless, migrants in the nineteenth-century American West clearly made strategic choices based on the same considerations as in eastern markets; their occupational choices depended on previous...

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