Immigration and Economic Development

Abstract

During the last two centuries economic and demographic changes have taken place with unprecedented speed. The population of the world, after several centuries of stability, has increased from 728 million in 1750, to 1,171 million in 1850, and then to 2,171 million in 1940, a phenomenal leap of 1 billion in ninety years. Meanwhile the European whites, the most prolific of the world's races in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were streaming overseas. From 1815 to the 1920's, some 55 million Europeans emigrated; about 19 million of them were from the British Isles. Some 36 million settled in the United States, over 4 million in Canada, 10 million in South America.The outlines of the demographic phenomena associated with this expansion are well known; perhaps even better known are the revolutionary agricultural, scientific, industrial, and commercial changes of the same period. The succession of events need not be traced here; and of the actual increase in aggregate or per capita productivity of the industrialized nations no precise estimate can be made. The rise in the gross value of international trade from $3 billion in 1840 to $40 billion in 1913 is one indication of the expansion of economies.