The Citizenship Advantage: Immigrant Socioeconomic Attainment in the Age of Mass Migration

Scholars who study immigrant economic progress often point to the success of Southern and Eastern Europeans who entered the United States in the early 20th century and draw inferences about whether today’s immigrants will follow a similar trajectory. However, little is known about the mechanisms that allowed for European upward advancement. This article begins to fill this gap by analyzing how naturalization policies influenced the economic success of immigrants across generations. Specifically, the author creates new panel data sets that follow immigrants and their children across complete-count U.S. censuses to understand the economic consequences of citizenship attainment. The author finds that naturalization raised occupational attainment for the first generation that then allowed children to have greater educational attainment and labor market success. He argues that economic progress was conditioned by political statuses for European-origin groups during the first half of the 20th century.