Immigration, Innovation, and the Geography of Growth
Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants settled in the United States. We study how this migration wave affected innovation and growth. Using a newly constructed dataset linking individual census records to historical immigration records and the universe of US patents, we highlight a new channel through which immigrants contributed to growth: they disproportionately settled in urban innovation hubs. To quantify the aggregate and regional effects of this mass migration episode, we develop a new spatial growth model in which skilled workers have a comparative advantage in innovation and sort endogenously across space. We find that international arrivals after 1880 raised US income per capita by 8.2% by 1940. Removing the subsequent immigration restrictions of the 1920s would have raised income per capita by a further 1.7% by 2000. Immigrants' skill composition and their concentration in urban hubs are key drivers of these effects.
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Copy CitationCostas Arkolakis, Sun Kyoung Lee, and Michael Peters, "Immigration, Innovation, and the Geography of Growth," NBER Working Paper 35392 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35392.Download Citation
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