THE WAR AND POST-WAR PERIOD 
The Comparative Volume of Migration and Changes in Employment 
in the Depression of 1921 
The major depression of the post-war period is the depression of 
1921. The recession phase of this period began in 1920, and the 
depression continued into 1922, but for the sake of brevity we shall 
designate it as the depression of 1921. The delimitation of its exact 
duration depends upon the slope of the trend assigned to the indexes 
of production and industrial activity, but the satisfactory deter- 
mination of trends for the short period since the war is indeed 
difficult. In our index of factory employment in New York and 
Massachusetts, the cycle of employment reached its high point in 
March, 1920, declined thereafter to its lowest point in January, 
1921, and remained below the estimated trend until December, 1922. 
Employment in the nine quarters from the first quarter of 1920 
to the first quarter of 1922, inclusive, is covered by the special 
investigation conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Re- 
search for the President’s Conference on Unemployment. The 
computations made by Dr. W. I. King on the basis of this investi- 
gation give the estimated average number of employees in each 
quarter, not only in manufacturing but also in other major industries. 
The estimated total number employed in the extraction of miner- 
als, construction, and manufacturing affords the best basis of com- 
parison with migration. These are the industries in which the great 
bulk of new immigrants engage. 
In Table 32 and Chart 25, Fig. A, are presented data concerning 
the change from quarter to quarter in the average number employed 
in the given industries and also the net additions to the alien male 
population of the United States in the same period, obtained by 
subtracting the recorded number of outgoing males, both emigrant 
and nonemigrant, from the recorded number of alien male arrivals, 
both immigrant and nonimmigrant. Each comparison, then, is 
between the net alien male migration in the given quarter and the 
increase or decrease from the previous quarter in the number em- 
ployed. 
Lag. 
A sharp decline in employment appears in the fourth quarter 
of 1920, but arrivals continue to exceed departures through that 
and the following two quarters. Only in the last two quarters 
of 1921 does the net movement of male aliens show an excess of 
departures. 
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