Europe’s Great Migration to North America, 1850-1920, offers lessons for today’s immigration patterns
In country after country around the world, fertility rates are falling rapidly.
The aging of the population and the dearth of young people is likely to imply slower migration flows in the decades to come. Remaining differences in rates of fertility across different regions might imply profound changes in the flows of migrants originating from different regions: Asian countries, with fertility rates well below the rate of replacement, may cede ground to sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain elevated, as the origin of the bulk of the world’s migrants. And some countries with very low fertility rates, like China, South Korea or Japan, may become prime destinations for migrants.
These forces come into clearer view when looking back at a prior period of massive — and economically positive — movement of people, the Great Migration from Europe to the New World from 1850-1920. The University of Manchester’s Guillaume Blanc and UCLA Anderson’s Romain Wacziarg, in a working paper using a multiplicity of historical data sources, document that European fertility rates were a key factor in emigration patterns to the New World. And that dynamic is still in play today.
Blanc and Wacziarg show that European countries with high fertility rates experienced more emigration to the New World. They suggest that migration seems to have served as an “escape valve” for Europeans caught up in the Malthusian economic conundrum in which technological advances spur population growth that eventually exceeds the resources (land, food) to support that growing base. Immigration, not just toward perceived better opportunity, but also, importantly, away from poverty, , lessens population pressures at home.
Buttressing this observation is that, as European fertility rates came down throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century — improving the balance of population to resources — so, too, did emigration flows.
The role of high fertility as a factor of migration patterns is still playing out in the 21st century. Studying global country-level migration and birth rates from 1990-2020, the researchers demonstrate that, in countries in which the fertility rate exceeds 3.5 births per woman, emigration is significantly higher than in countries with slower population growth. Countries that still have very high fertility rates are concentrated in Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, although their demographic dynamism is rapidly declining.
Absent immigration, a country needs a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain its population. While the current global average is 2.2 live births per woman, the 2023 fertility rate in the U.S. was 1.66. The average for all of the European Union was 1.46. The latter were lands of emigration in the 19th century, but became lands of immigration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Malthus and the Age of Mass Migration
The researchers construct a model that builds on the work of 18th century economist Thomas Malthus. In the worldview espoused by Malthus, economic growth cannot prevent stagnation in standards of living. A key dynamic is that as technology leads to higher productivity, incomes initially rise, which sets off an increase in family size (more income to raise more kids). Yet such population growth eventually means there are too many workers (and mouths to feed) for the available work that the land can accommodate. The population grows faster than available resources, so incomes return to a level around subsistence.
Blanc and Wacziarg then add emigration to the model. They factor in the ease of migration and the potential income advantage to earn more as an emigrant. The model predicts that, when high fertility rates create Malthusian pressure on the economy, emigration becomes an “escape valve” for those struggling in a country with an economy that cannot support its high rate of population growth.
In turn, Europe’s ability to send many emigrants to the New World created better living conditions back in the home country. They conclude, “Europeans derived substantial benefits from the violent subjugation of colonized populations and extraction from their empires in the colonial era. But settler colonization was a potent determinant of European development in another important way: by allowing European societies to escape from the Malthusian dynamics that had kept them in poverty for so long.”
How France Fits In
France shifted to a lower fertility rate by the end of the 18th century, a century before other European countries. The data shown below defines a fertility transition as being the first time a country’s fertility rate drops persistently by more than 10%. France stands out in how early it underwent its fertility transition. And the dynamics of its population, as a result, are in stark contrast with England’s.
Studying migration patterns from France to the New World, relative to the rest of Europe, provides an interesting way to illustrate the role that fertility rates might play — and explains why the French diaspora around the world is so small. It also explains why France in the 19th century attracted many immigrants — just like the U.S.
Wacziarg has collaborated with Blanc and Tufts’ Enrico Spolaore on other research exploring why France was so far ahead of the curve on bringing down its birth rate. Wacziarg and Spolaore also recently collaborated with Paris School of Business’ Mickael Melki and Paris School of Economics’ Hillel Rapoport to document how immigrants in France during the fertility transition effectively transmitted French fertility norms back to their home country.
For this new research, Blanc and Wacziarg use U.S. Census data from 1850 to 1920 to document that the French, who were ostensibly not suffering from an acute level of Malthusian population pressure, were not incentivized to migrate to the New World.
Tellingly, the researchers track country-specific migration patterns relative to when a given country began its transition to a lower fertility rate. As shown in the charts below, the onset of a lower fertility rate (the dotted vertical line) often coincides with a drop in emigration flows (the solid line) — with a lag of at least 20 years.
The very modern online thirst for tracking family history also delivers interesting data for the authors’ fertility and emigration thesis. Building on past research that created a large quantitative data set from online family tree research, Blanc and Wacziarg study migration and fertility rates for more than 10 million individuals born between 1750 and 1900 with links to Europe.
Here, too, they find evidence that the bigger the Old-World family, the more likely it was that one of their children would emigrate to the New World. That trend picks up when technology — namely the steam-powered ships — makes the Atlantic crossing easier. With steamships, the escape valve of migration became more potent, leading to mass migrations from labor-abundant countries in Europe to land abundant regions in the Americas.
While we no longer live in Malthusian times, the history of migrations carries contemporary lessons. The current worldwide decline in birth rates will lead to profound changes in the patterns of migratory flows. While declining fertility around the world should lead to declining pressures to emigrate, it will also require many countries to consider immigration as a solution to labor shortages. How this tension will be resolved will be fascinating to watch in the decades to come.
Featured Faculty
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Romain Wacziarg
Professor of Economics; Hans Hufschmid Chair in Management
About the Research
Blanc, G., & Wacziarg, R. (2024). Malthusian Migrations.
