Leah Boustan: Debunking Myths
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Bibliographic details
- Authors: CHRIS WELLISZ
- Published: March 3, 2025
Background and intellectual trajectory
- Childhood and family influence: high school trip from Boston to Chicago to interview great-uncle Joe; family story of immigration from Russia in 1891 and economic advancement from pushcart to storeowner.
- Early inspirations: Stephen Spielberg’s interviews with Holocaust survivors in the mid-1990s spurred interest in genealogy.
- Academic path:
- Undergraduate at Princeton; junior and senior thesis advisor Henry Farber.
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for doctorate in economics.
- PhD at Harvard University under Claudia Goldin.
- Dissertation: “Black Migration, White Flight: The Effect of Black Migration on Northern Cities and Labor Markets.”
- Career highlights:
- First published paper on immigration and religious persecution, studying some 1.5 million Russian Jews in the decades before World War I (published in 2007).
- First book: Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (published in 2017).
- Collaboration with Ran Abramitzky beginning with joint article “Europe’s Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration” (published in 2012).
- Coauthored book for general audience: Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success (published in 2022).
- Administrative roles: director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton; Abramitzky became senior associate dean of the social sciences at Stanford.
- Personal: Boustan is married to Ra’anan Boustan; both couples have three children.
Data, methods, and research collaboration
- Data sources and methods:
- Decades of US census data linked across generations using computer algorithms.
- Ancestry.com used as a priceless source of genealogical data; collaboration formalized after contact from Ancestry.com’s lawyer.
- Oral histories from the Ellis Island Oral History Project and original surveys conducted by the researchers.
- Research collaboration:
- Longstanding intellectual partnership with Ran Abramitzky; describe themselves as thinking about the world “quite similarly.”
- Collaborative model includes bringing graduate students into projects; large-scale projects can involve many coauthors (next project has 37 coauthors).
Key empirical findings and themes from Boustan’s work
- Intergenerational mobility:
- First-generation immigrants generally do no better economically than native-born peers; the rags-to-riches story is characterized as a myth.
- Upward mobility is incremental; the second generation closes the earnings gap with native-born Americans.
- Counter to personal priors, children of recent arrivals from Guatemala or Nigeria do just as well as children of immigrants from Italy, Norway, or Russia in the 19th century.
- Assimilation and integration:
- Immigrants today learn English just as quickly as in the past.
- Immigrants today are just as likely to leave immigrant residential enclaves.
- Immigrants today are even more likely to marry outside their national or ethnic group.
- Conclusion: today’s immigrants try just as hard to embrace American culture as earlier cohorts.
- Labor market effects:
- Research challenges the assumption that immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans.
- Where overlap exists, competition tends to be among workers who do the same jobs (often other recent immigrants).
- Immigrants concentrate in work that does not require English-language proficiency (examples: landscaping, construction); native-born workers more often fill customer-facing roles.
- Low-skilled and high-skilled workers can be complements rather than substitutes (example: restaurant where low-skilled perform dishwashing and high-skilled serve as waiters).
- Immigrant entrepreneurship creates jobs (examples: restaurants, medical practices).
- Immigrant-provided services (cooking, cleaning, childcare) free up time for native-born Americans and can increase native-born productivity.
Public engagement and policy implications
- Transition from academic to public audience:
- Dozen papers over more than a decade addressed academic assumptions about immigration.
- Surge in public debate around the 2016 US presidential election prompted outreach to a broader audience, leading to a nonfiction book in 2022.
- Policy recommendations and perspective:
- Advocates taking a long view on immigration: immigrant success accrues over time.
- Argues that long-term outcomes reduce the need to preselect immigrants on skills or education, contrasting with selective systems used by countries such as Australia and Canada.
- Counterarguments:
- Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute) acknowledges the book’s merits but disputes the size of demand for low-skilled migration.
- Salam favors more selective immigration policy to mitigate short-term social frictions and fiscal costs (examples: subsidized housing or health care for low-skilled immigrants).
Ongoing and future work
- New research agenda: large-scale project on immigration to Europe and its political effects, involving 37 coauthors.
- Continued use of large datasets, generational linkage algorithms, oral histories, and surveys to test commonly held beliefs about migration and immigration.
Content summarized from: Leah Boustan: Debunking Myths, CHRIS WELLISZ, March 2025.
Content in this bundle
- People in Economics — Leah Platt Boustan