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ABSTRACT
As both a marriage act and an immigration act, the Expatriation Act of 1907 restricted U.S. women’s freedom of marriage by stating that marrying aliens would lead to loss of U.S. citizenship. To study the effects of the Expatriation Act, I conduct a statistical analysis using 1910 full-count U.S. census data. I find that the Expatriation Act of 1907 generated significantly negative effects on intermarriage between American women and foreign-born men, particularly noncitizens. In particular, I find that it was the citizenship, rather than men’s non-U.S. origin, that accounted for the negative effects of the Expatriation Act of 1907 on intermarriage. These results show a decline in male immigrants’ marital assimilation, and potentially social and economic assimilation. As for the magnitude, the effects were large: the decline in intermarriage was at least 15 percent relative to the pre-Act intermarriage rate. Besides these main results, selective emigration to Canada and Europe driven by intermarriage cannot explain the main empirical results of the paper. The Expatriation Act of 1907 also had no significant effects on women’s entry into the marriage market. Finally, the effects of the Expatriation Act of 1907 on intermarriage were heterogeneous by family immigration background, but less so by geographic region.
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Notes
1. In fact, even before the passage of the Expatriation Act of 1907, marriages between native-born women and foreign-born men were not common in the late 19th century and early 20th century U.S (e.g. Dribe et al., Citation2018; Pagnini & Morgan, Citation1990; Wong, Citation2016). and intermarriages of native-born women with certain immigrant groups – such as Asians, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Jews – were particularly unwelcome (e.g. Logan & Shin, Citation2012; Sassler, Citation2005; Wildsmith et al., Citation2012).
2. Marital status is determined by the variable “duration of the current marriage’’(Ruggles et al., Citation2019).
3. One apparent exception was the 1908 cohort. The 1910 cohort was fairly small. However, as the Census Bureau started the 1910 census in April, this number could not reflect the size of the entire 1910 cohort. The estimated cohort size should be above 0.5 million, similar to or slightly higher than that of the 1907 cohort.
4. In the 1910 census, Austria, Hungary, and other regions of the Empire (e.g. Slovakia) were identified separately by census enumerators, while Russian Poland was not identified separately (Xu, Citation2019).
5. Note that naturalization reported in Table 1 is conditional on staying in the U.S., and naturalized immigrants were less likely to be return migrants.
6. Such unfavorable origins in the early 20th century included Asiatic ethnic origins, but also included European ethnic origins not belonging to traditional sending countries of U.S. immigrants in the earlier stages of the age of mass migration. These unfavorable European origins included, e.g. Southern and Eastern European origins (Ngai, Citation1999, Citation2004) that became increasingly common in the early 20th century.
7. A common complaint was that many immigrants were only temporary immigrants (Bandiera et al., Citation2013) who did not economically assimilate into the U.S. and contribute to the local economy.
8. This included women’s suffrage movement (Cott, Citation1998) and the rise in female labor force participation (Olivetti, Citation2014) in the early 20th century U.S.
9. It is worth noting that Cable Act itself continued to provide for the loss of citizenship by American women who married Asians, who were aliens ineligible to citizenship (Cott, Citation1998).
10. This number is lower than the intermarriage rate reported in Section 2.2 because women marrying during 1901 to 1910 were disproportionately less likely to marry foreign-born immigrants.
11. Please see the details of the construction of occupational scores on IPUMS (This is reflected by the variable occupational score. The 1910 census did not survey individuals’ income; the U.S. census started to survey individuals’ income only in 1940. IPUMS employs Sobek’s (Citation1996) construction of occupational scores for estimating occupation-based earnings for historical census data based on 1950 census data (Ruggles et al., Citation2019): “(The variable of occupational scores) assigns each occupation in all years a value representing the median total income in hundreds of 1950 dollars of all persons with that particular occupation in 1950.’’
12. 1910 U.S. census data show that the age at current marriage among native-born women in the U.S. increased by less than 1 during 1901 to 1910.
13. For example, in this test, I consider women who were 33 or 34 (as the 1910 census was taken in April) in 1910 census records for studying marriage decisions in 1901, as these women were about 24 in 1901.
14. The 1900 U.S. census (Ruggles et al., Citation2019) recorded that there were 10,527,270 people who were born outside the U.S. 1,229,924 were born in Canada, 340,602 were born in Norway, 1,182,209 were born in the U.K. (not including Ireland), and 585,871 were born in Sweden.
15. Only 5% samples of Canadian census data are available; numbers are thus estimated.
16. In this regression, birthright citizenship serves as a coarse proxy variable for citizenship status. As discussed in the previous section, the 1910 U.S. census did not survey women’s citizenship status as the government considered it to be the same as husbands’ citizenship status.