MIGRATION AND BUSINESS CYCLES
For example, in the reports of the U. S. Industrial Commission,
the conclusion is reached, after a comparison of the course of whole-
sale prices and immigration, ‘that there is a striking coincidence,
since the year 1868, between business conditions and the volume
of immigration” so that ‘it may be said that immigration since the
Civil War is a reflection of industrial conditions.”
However, that the adjustment of migration to employment con-
ditions is not perfect is suggested by J. W. Jenks and W. Jett Lauck
in their analysis of the immigrant as a dynamic factor in industry.
“The statement,” they say, “that the influx and the outgo of
foreign-born workmen automatically adjusts itself to activity or
stagnation in mining and manufacturing is only partly true.”’s
In the subsequent pages we shall examine the evidence concerning
migration and industrial conditions in an effort to determine the
accuracy of the a priori reasoning and of the opinions just cited.
Does the volume of migration ebb and flow with industry? Do
some elements in immigration show the readier response? Is this
response imperfect?
First let us turn our attention to the earlier period for which the
evidence is less detailed and the picture consequently less clear-cut.
The Periods Selected.
For convenience of analysis the years for which immigration data
are available for the United States (1820 to date) are divided in
this study into four main periods—namely, the seventy years from
1820 to 1889, inclusive; the pre-war quarter century, 1890 to 1914;
the war period, 1914 to 1918; and the post-war years, 1919 to 1923.
This division, although somewhat arbitrary, finds justification
partly in essential differences in the character of migration and em-
ployment movements in the several periods, and partly in variations
in the adequacy of the available statistical data.
However, in the following analysis there has been no rigid ad-
herence to the chronological boundaries just mentioned. These
somewhat arbitrary limits have been ignored whenever it has ap-
peared that the objects of our inquiry would be furthered by ex-
tending the analysis of a particular phase beyond the termination
of the period in which the analysis begins.
3United States Industrial Commission, Reporis, Vol. XV, Immigration, p. 305.
4J. W. Jenks and W. Jett Lauck, The Immigration Problem, third edition, p. 208.
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