Hacerse la América en Argentina

Argentina, it is probably unnecessary to say on this blog, is a country of immigrants. Moreover, it is a country of immigrants from almost the same places as Brooklyn got immigrants back in the day, as this photograph shows. 

Argentines had an awesome expression to mean that you were doing well in the New World: “Hacerse la América.” It translates to “making América.” Not “making it in América” but “making América,” as in “making partner” or “making tenure.” How awesome is that?

But how many people really did make América? Sure, unskilled laborers could earn higher wages in Argentina just by getting off the boat from Italy or Spain or Syria or Russia ... but that’s not making América. Making América is doing better the longer you’re in the New World and seeing your children do better still. How common was that?

Well, two new papers can now tell us. The first is by Santiago Pérez (U.C. Davis); the second by Leticia Arroyo Abad (Middlebury) and Blanca Sánchez-Alonso (UCEU). Today I will talk about the first.

Pérez matched individual immigrants and their children across the 1869 and 1895 censuses. He also matched immigrants from arrival data collected in 1882-84 to the 1895 census. And what did he find?

Immigrants moved up the occupational ladder faster and farther than native-born Argentines. That is, if you were an unskilled laborer in 1869 and you were an immigrant, you had a 23% chance of making it to a white-collar profession by 1895. For the native born, that same chance was only 8%. Immigrants also showed significantly higher wage growth than natives. Except, for some reason, the Swiss. That country appears to have sent a bunch of slackers to the Southern Cone.

As for the people who arrived in 1882-84, fully 75% of them upgraded their occupations by 1895, a rate considerably faster than in the United States. And unlike the United States, there was remarkably little immigrant downgrading, the 19th-Century equivalent of having the former Russian brain surgeon driving a cab in Houston.

What about the children? If you were the native-born son of an unskilled worker, you had only a 10% chance of making into the ranks of the white-collar class. But if you were the son of an immigrant unskilled worker, well, then you had a 36% chance of moving on up, to the top, to a deluxe apartment in the sky. And that result holds controlling for parental literacy, earnings, and access to property.

Better opportunity than in the United States! There are two potential explanations, though, which I may get to in another post. One of which is based on the immigrants ... the other on how Argentina differed from the U.S. and Canada at a deep structural level, and not in a good way.

Comments

[Blanca Sánchez-Alonso]

Waiting for your next post Noel!