Data, Dialects, and Migration Experiences

How has the first decade of global migration studies influenced the fields of American immigration history, ethnic studies, and the theories of human movement across the Atlantic and globally? These three books provide no real test of overall influence, but they suggest that resistance to the new paradigm as well as the development of new approaches to global migration have become readily apparent in scholarly endeavors.

Raymond L. Cohn's study contains an analysis of his acclaimed theory of a unique antebellum period of immigration to the United States and serves as a reference work for those "searching for numerical information" on Western European immigration to antebellum America (p. xiv). In a sense, it represents everything you wanted to know about the economic aspects of transatlantic immigration of Western Europeans to the United States prior to 1860 but, given the uncertainties of the data from antebellum passenger lists, were afraid to try to find out.

Cohn argues that the period between 1820 and 1860 is unique in that it includes the first mass immigration of people who intended to stay permanently in their destination and thus to reshape its economy and society. Its primary character is delimited by the means of transport: the sailing ship, which took about forty days to make the trip between European ports and New York City. The time and money expended and the nature of the voyage made it unlikely that these five million immigrants would return to Europe or migrate again. In contrast, another thirty million migrants made their passage in cheaper, faster steamships after 1860, and many became return migrants.

Cohn contrasts his study with the current migration paradigm, which rejects emigrations and immigrations as no longer descriptive of historic, global movements of people. Although accepting the agency of migrants and regional analysis of the point of departure and arrival, Cohn insists that the United States pattern before 1860 stands apart as "fundamentally different" from later periods of migration activity (p. 10). Struggling to make sense of good data, questionable data, and nonexistent data, Cohn nonetheless concludes that sailboat technology limited return migration to a minimum and overwhelmingly encouraged immigrant permanence. He points out that most studies of migration to the U.S. are based on the post-1860 steamship era and support the global migration paradigm but do not apply to nor predict the antebellum character of immigration.

Cohn rests his work on "the classical theoretical migration model" (p. 2) of economists, which defines immigration as a rational economic decision made by an individual to advance economic opportunity and increase expected lifetime earnings. As an emigrant, the economic man—white, adult, skilled and determined—stayed, upon arrival in the United States, where he intended to go and profited from that move. The only nod to gender differentiation is in the possessive pronoun for economic actors as "his or her" (p. 130). The period of mass immigration between 1820 and 1860, Cohn argues, nicely fits this model and can be predicted by it. Still, a discussion of the possible meanings of permanence to these immigrants is needed to clarify Cohn's views. An assumption of economic advancement is not enough.

If economic man emigrates and finds his situation as an immigrant untenable (a poor choice) but also calculates that a desired return migration is beyond his means, what becomes of his rational economic choice to emigrate? One of the persistent errors in applying social science theory to human behavior is the assumption that reported behavior implies or even reveals...