Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

The Center for Political Economy (CPE) at Columbia World Projects nurtures new thinking, including alternatives to market fundamentalism, geared to building inclusive political economies. To call attention to ambitious new ideas that engage these issues, the Center is launching a series that will embrace and critically examine influential recent books through discussions with their authors, open to the public, at Columbia University. 

Recently, a spate of economists have authored conceptual books on topics of interdisciplinary and cross-sector import for an audience broader than their field. Meanwhile, scholars from other disciplines are tackling pressing problems of political economy from a range of perspectives. To spur engagement between economists and scholars and practitioners from other disciplines, this series will bring together diverse perspectives in an open dialogue. 

The series will open with Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, discussing her latest book Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (PublicAffairs 2022). Streets of Gold provides new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream through a data-driven analysis of mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, will serve as the discussant.

This event will take place on January 19th, 2023 from 4:15pm to 5:45pm at The Forum (601 West 125th Street) in Room 315 (Third Floor). 

Read the recap of this event below.

The story of America is the story of immigration; an important narrative embedded in classroom curriculums and reinforced by the larger-than-life myth making of popular culture. To be American is to be familiar with the journeys through Ellis Island, to experience the food, music, and wares of successive ethnic neighborhood cityscapes, and to know intimately the rag-to-riches tale of the dynastic surnames carved into the nation’s most imposing edifices – Carnegie, Kennedy, and Vanderbilt—whose origin stories began in Europe centuries ago.

From the comfort of the present, Americans extol the virtues of prior immigration waves whose successes, they believe, are due in no small part to the embrace of assimilation, often while denigrating immigrants of today. But how much of that narrative is true, and what role does it play in how Americans currently view immigration trends and the political and legal environment that shape them?

Did immigrants in the past assimilate and integrate in ways that current immigrants do not? Did they move up the economic ladder quickly? What similarities and what differences do we find when looking at immigration to the US across time?

On January 19, 2023, Princeton Economics Professor Leah Boustan explored these questions as she discussed her recent book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, co-authored with Ran Abramitzky, at the inaugural Columbia Center for Political Economy Big Ideas Book Series.

Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, Professor Boustan presented evidence of a very different immigration story, with counterintuitive conclusions that belie Lazarus’s poetic framing of a diaspora of tired, poor, huddled masses. Many European immigrants at the turn of the century were not penniless, according to Boustan, but arrived in the US with job skills and other resources. Those who did start in low-paying jobs did not move quickly into riches as a reward for their industry, but continued to lag behind immigrants who entered the US labor market at higher wages. Patterns we see replicated today.

Discussant Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, probed Professor Boustan’s methodology. In particular, Professor Ngai drew attention to the limits of comparing immigrants at the 25th percentile of the income distribution with native-born whites at the same percentile given situational differences. One concern with this comparison, according to Ngai, stems from the differences in education levels and social capital between immigrants and native-born whites with similar income levels. 

Moderated by Suresh Naidu, Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs and Economics at Columbia University and CPE co-director, the talk was attended by Columbia and Barnard faculty members and students.