Jason Richwine coined the term “Irish Retort” to describe one of the most common tactics deployed in debates over immigration. Raise any concerns about mass immigration today and the response is automatic: “What about the Irish!”

When Irish immigrants arrived in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were poor, Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) and heavily overrepresented in crime. Nativists panicked then too. Yet over time, the Irish assimilated, climbed up the social ladder, and became indistinguishable from the average American. The implication is clear, though usually left unstated: today’s immigrants will follow the same arc, and any claim to the contrary is just recycled bigotry.

It’s a neat story, rhetorically powerful and emotionally satisfying. The problem is what it leaves out. Careful studies using multi-generational data show that differences in social outcomes are much more persistent than is commonly assumed. What appears to be rapid convergence is often an artifact of looking too narrowly or too briefly. With this in mind, let’s examine how well the story of rapid European assimilation holds up.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.1

This selection process radically alters how we interpret the observed convergence in outcomes. Abramitzky et al. (2014) show that most European immigrant groups that arrived in the early twentieth century, including the Irish, Italians and Russians, already had above-average incomes in the first generation. (There was often little difference between first- and second-generation outcomes.) It is not difficult to turn a group into a success story when many of its poorest members voluntarily leave.

Even after accounting for selection, European economic differences did not evaporate entirely. Using a unique three-generation dataset linking immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940, Ward (2020) finds substantial persistence in occupational income across European ethnicities. As this is the first study to use linked grandparent-grandson data, it demonstrates that intergenerational correlations are stronger when measured properly. As Ward notes, his findings cut directly against the “melting pot” narrative in which ethnic differences fade within a generation or two. They don’t.

Nor did immigrants simply arrive as blank slates and then absorb American culture. They brought their values, habits and norms with them, and these left durable imprints on the places where they settled. We understand this intuitively when it comes to cuisine: Italians didn’t just eat pasta themselves; they taught Americans to eat pasta.2 But the same logic applies in other domains.

Continues: The Myth of Assimilation – Aporia