bwaber reviewed Streets of Gold by Ran Abramitzky
A Very Good Book with a Few Glaring Holes
4 stars
In this book, Abramitzky and Boustan systematically exorcise most myths and complaints about immigration in the US - that modern immigrants don't integrate into US society like previous waves of immigrants, that immigrants take jobs from native born US workers, that immigrants and their descendants are fiscal drains on the government, and so on.
There's a lot of time spent on the children of immigrants, as they show that this group has very positive economic outcomes relative to their parents. These sections are insightful, and the hypotheses posed about the causes of this success - namely that immigrants tend to take jobs below their true skill level and that they tend to move to economically growing regions - is convincing.
Some major omissions here, however, prevent this book from being a complete home run. Native Americans and colonialism in North America, for example, is literally never mentioned or examined. Most …
In this book, Abramitzky and Boustan systematically exorcise most myths and complaints about immigration in the US - that modern immigrants don't integrate into US society like previous waves of immigrants, that immigrants take jobs from native born US workers, that immigrants and their descendants are fiscal drains on the government, and so on.
There's a lot of time spent on the children of immigrants, as they show that this group has very positive economic outcomes relative to their parents. These sections are insightful, and the hypotheses posed about the causes of this success - namely that immigrants tend to take jobs below their true skill level and that they tend to move to economically growing regions - is convincing.
Some major omissions here, however, prevent this book from being a complete home run. Native Americans and colonialism in North America, for example, is literally never mentioned or examined. Most analyses here compare immigrants to white Americans, explicitly because Black Americans have poor economic mobility. This coupled with the nearly complete avoidance of any discussion of the effects of racism (there's only one section that spends time on this), is especially galling. While a consideration of these issues would frankly only make the conclusions of the book stronger, they stain an otherwise solid contribution to the scholarly literature.