… is from page 285 of Douglas Irwin’s meticulously researched and timely 2017 volume, Clashing Over Commerce:
The most underrated international factor behind America’s industrialization [during the later half of the 19th century] was the work done by unskilled immigrants who labored in the manufacturing industries and by skilled immigrants who facilitated the absorption of new technology.
DBx: Indeed so. (I remind readers again of this important paper on this same topic by Cecil Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott.) And do not forget another important finding: high post-Civil War tariffs in the United States did not plausibly contribute to, or promote, faster or ‘better’ economic growth in the U.S.
Those who wish to make America great again and who seek guidance on how to do so from 19th-century U.S. government policies ought to enthusiastically support much more open immigration into the U.S.
