1 MIGRATION AND BUSINESS CYCLES
immigrants”; the third column, the total of the first two columns;
and the fourth column, a similar total for both sexes combined.
In like manner, the right-hand half of the table gives, for the same
four groups, the net movement, that is, arrivals less departures.
Of these several series, the most important with reference to its
bearing on the contemporaneous employment situation is probably
the net movement of males, including temporary migrants, as given
in Column G. It will be noted that in the seventeen months of
this period, the net contribution of migration to the number of alien
males in the United States was approximately three-quarters of a
million. If nonimmigrants and nonemigrants are excluded from
consideration, the net immigration is even greater, exceeding,
slightly, nine hundred thousand males. This large volume of net
immigration is chiefly due to unusually heavy immigration and
light emigration during several months of 1913; but even in 1914 it
is only in January and June that there is an excess of departing over
arriving male aliens. It would appear that immigration, in the
year before the war, contributed materially to the growing volume
of unemployment as portrayed in Charts 13 and 20 on preceding
pages of this chapter.”
CHAPTER SUMMARY*
The present chapter has dealt with the quarter century im-
mediately preceding the Great War, which is, in many respects,
the most significant period for the purposes of this study. The
sDirector’'s Comment.—Col. M. C. Rorty, a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research,
comments as follows: It would hardly seem that the fact that there is frequently, if not usually, a net im-
migration during periods of declining employment would, in itself, justify the conclusion that such
immigration contributes to, or accentuates, unemployment. If there should be a static population in the
United States, with no immigration or emigration whatever, and other economic factors were unchanged,
we should presumably have business booms and depressions of the same character and intensity as we would
have with a population growing at a uniform rate. Furthermore, for any uniform rate of increase in po-
pulation, it would seem to be a matter of relative (economic) indifference whether the resulting annual
increase in the number of (potential) workers was derived from the natural growth of the native population,
or from immigration, or from a combination of the two. Immigration might involve a gradual shifting of
the native-born workers from unskilled to skilled or semi-skilled occupations, but such a process, if con-
tinuous and uniform, should not involve economic disturbances of serious character.
If the preceding arguments are sound—and they appear to be supported by experience as well as by
economic theory—then it might very well be argued that the effect of immigration is almost always to
reduce the severity of periods of unemployment, since it is rather clear that the net movements so vary
tha they tend in practically all cases to reduce the rate of increase of the working population during periods
e :
p a undoubtedly flaws in this last argument as well as in the opposing one. Nevertheless the
nature of the problem can be made clearer in some respects by considering whether periods of unemploy-
ment would be made more or less severe in the United States if the free movement of workers between the
several states should be restricted. Is there, for example, any indication, or reason to believe, that the
western states have suffered more severely from business depressions and unemployment than they would
if they had not received a steady influx of population from the easternstates?
The preceding points of view are in no way intended as an argument for unrestricted immigration.
They are brought forward simply to suggest that an increase in unemployment is not necessarily one of
the evils to be charged against it.
The preceding comments apply to several other portions of the text.
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