Full Citation

Title: Hidden in Plain Sight: Global Labor Force Exchange in the Chinese American Population of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2002

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: Despite a once conspicuous presence in the Western states, little is known demographically about the Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th U.S. The widely accepted model of a declining male 'sojourner society,' beset by draconian restrictions on immigration and the impossibility of family formation, persists largely unexamined. This paper tests the sojourner hypothesis through the application of cohort-component projection on census data from 1880 through 1940, including data recently made available as part of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS), a historical data set constituted from U.S. census manuscripts. The results fail to support the sojourner model of passive population decline, suggesting instead that the Chinese actively engaged in a collective strategy of long-distance labor exchange to maximize economic productivity among Chinese workers in the U.S.

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Chew, Kenneth; Liu, John M.

Conference Name: Population Association of America Conference

Publisher Location: Atlanta

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: