Description:

Speaker Carlo Medici

Title: Closing Ranks: The Effect of Immigration on Organized Labor

Abstract: This paper shows that immigration caused the development of labor unions in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. I digitize archival data to construct a new dataset on unionization during 1900-1920 and use a shift-share instrument to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in immigration. My analysis yields several novel findings. I document that counties that received more immigrants experienced an increase in the share of unionized workers. Immigration also increased the number of union branches, their size, and the probability that a county had any labor union. Further, I show that the effect was driven by increased participation of U.S.-born workers. I explore the mechanisms behind this effect and find that unionization did not grow larger in counties more exposed to the immigrants' labor market competition. Instead, I provide evidence that cultural concerns drove unionization. First, the increase was more prominent for unions that adopted nativist positions during this period. Second, unions developed due to the arrival of culturally distant immigrants. Third, this effect was most prevalent in places with worse attitudes towards immigration. These findings identify an unexplored consequence of immigration: the development of organizations that aim to protect workers' status in the labor market. They also highlight immigration as a novel driver of unionization in the early twentieth century United States.