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How the other half died: Immigration and mortality in US cities
Ager, Philipp
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Feigenbaum, James J.
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Hansen, Casper Worm
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Tan, Huiren
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URL:
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https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_pa...
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Document Type:
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Working paper
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Year of publication:
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2020
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The title of a journal, publication series:
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Discussion Papers / CEPR
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Volume:
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14949
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Place of publication:
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London
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Publishing house:
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Centre for Economic Policy Research
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ISSN:
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0265-8003
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Publication language:
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English
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Institution:
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School of Law and Economics > Angewandte Makroökonomik (Ager 2021-)
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Subject:
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330 Economics
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Classification:
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JEL:
I14 , J15 , N32 , N92,
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Keywords (English):
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density , immigration , nativism , urban mortality
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Abstract:
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Fears of immigrants as a threat to public health have a long and sordid history. At the turn of the 20th century, when millions of immigrants crowded into dense American cities, contemporaries blamed the high urban mortality penalty on the newest arrivals. Nativist sentiments eventually led to the implementation of restrictive quota acts in the 1920s, substantially curtailing immigration. We capture the "missing immigrants" induced by the quotas to estimate the effect of immigration on mortality. We find that cities with more missing immigrants experienced sharp declines in deaths from infectious diseases from the mid-1920s until the late 1930s. The blame for these negative mortality effects lies not with the immigrants, but on the living conditions they endured. We show that mortality declines were largest in cities where immigrants resided in the most
crowded and squalid conditions and where public health resources were stretched the thinnest.
Though immigrants did die from infectious diseases at higher rates than the US-born, the mortality decline we find is primarily driven by crowding not changes in population composition or contagion, as we show mortality improvements for both US- and foreign-born populations in more quota-affected cities.
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 | Dieser Datensatz wurde nicht während einer Tätigkeit an der Universität Mannheim veröffentlicht, dies ist eine Externe Publikation. |
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