This chapter studied the occupational sorting of immigrants across municipalities of São Paulo in 1872 and settlement colonies in 1897-1920. Its main contribution to the literature on the determinants of immigration was to consider explicitly how different immigration policies influenced the allocation of foreigners. The empirical analyses showed some unexpected results regarding the occupational sorting of different nationalities once these policies were taken into account, adding nuances on how certain nationalities benefited from the design of different immigration policies, while others had to find their own channels of economic integration. Furthermore, the chapter provided a sub-national case study for Latin America during the Age of Mass Migration. In this context, São Paulo is an example of a region that widely experimented with different policy instruments and received immigrants from a vast array of nationalities.
The migratory waves to São Paulo in the period 1820-1920 were classified into two main categories according to the prevailing immigration policies, namely the hiring of foreign bonded laborers to the plantations and the settlement of immigrants in rural colonies. The historical analysis emphasized how Brazilian policies swung between these alternatives throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These policies attracted immigrants of different nationalities, partly following the European emigration life cycle, but not limited to it. The empirical analysis, in turn, showed how local economic opportunities and institutional constraints molded the sorting of immigrants, leading to three main conclusions.
First, immigrants sorted against rural employment, even in regions where bonded labor had been the prevalent immigration policy. Second, foreign landownership had a rather limited impact on the sorting of immigrants, even where the immigration policies were based on the
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foundation of settlement colonies. Third, the sorting into urban occupations was influenced both by immigrants’ nationality and the prevailing immigration policy in the regions where they settled.
The analysis was conclusive in showing either a nonexistent or a negative association between the presence of foreigners and agricultural labor. This conclusion is aligned with sociological and historical accounts that show how physical and manual labor were negatively perceived in a society that was based on slavery until 1888. Even in regions where bonded labor had prevailed, immigrants avoided agricultural employment, contrary to the aims of plantation owners. These results are also in line with the literature that argues that labor remuneration was hampered by technological and institutional constraints, even in an economy with a potentially high land per labor ratio. Relatedly, only specific groups of immigrants were positively correlated with landownership. Only the sorting of Americans was positively correlated with foreign landownership in regions where no immigration policy had prevailed. With the exception of the English, rural settlement colonies failed to make foreigners sort positively as rural proprietors. Moreover, regions where bonded labor had prevailed only experimented the positive sorting of a tiny minority in foreign landownership.
Other contributions of immigrants aside, they were on average unable to change deeply rooted institutions that made Latin America infamous for its degree of land concentration.
Complementing these results, estimates for the settlement colonies in 1897-1920 showed that immigrants sorted majorly as farmers in those rural settlements. On average, foreigners who were in a settlement colony at the beginning of the twentieth century put significant effort in remaining in agricultural occupations. Whether this result translated into a higher share of foreign landowners in later periods cannot be answered with the evidence compiled for this study. Nevertheless, the negative effect of the interaction between foreign landownership and settlement colonies on the number of Germans in 1872 is an important reminder that there was no automatic link between initial settlement in a rural colony – as accomplished by an important German migratory wave in the 1820s – and the attainment of longer-term landownership.
For the urban economy, important nuances appeared once occupational sorting was interacted with the immigration policies. Contrary to the hypothesis that northwestern Europeans had sorted into manufactures and specialized services, results showed that the English and Germans behaved almost in perfectly opposite directions, with each adapting to opportunities
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available locally. While the English sorted positively in foreign landownership in regions where settlement colonies had prevailed, Germans did not and instead sorted into manufacturing-related occupations. Relatedly, the prediction that southern Europeans had sorted into services and trade-related occupations was not fully confirmed. Trade-related professions provided a potentially cheaper channel of occupational sorting for a wide array of nationalities.
While studying the determinants of immigration for more than twenty nationalities introduced some statistical noise into the results, the emergence of some patterns shows the fruitfulness of this approach. The exceptionalism of the English and American immigrants in Brazil was clearly shown with data for the first time. Similarities in the sorting of some minorities against agricultural employment and in favor of trade-related occupations was a new finding; and so was the unexpected differences between the English and Germans in their occupational sorting. By contrast, the widespread distribution of Portuguese across regions could have been hypothesized due to the Brazilian colonial past. Nevertheless, the chapter was positive in showing that this was the only nationality to avoid regions with more registered epidemics and that the Portuguese were underrepresented in the settlement colonies in 1897-1920.
Notwithstanding, further empirical and historical research is still required in this thriving literature. First, the elaboration of indices on returns to skill disaggregated at sub-national levels is urgently required to better assess the determinants of immigration to Latin America.
A challenge is to consider how contractual designs blurred the relationship between labor remuneration and marginal productivity. Moreover, the results of this chapter are conditional correlations. Causal assessments require adequately instrumenting the occupational distribution in municipalities or matching individuals across censuses. The second approach has been the direction mostly pursued by the literature, but it might be less successful for the case at hand, for which the next available census is from 1890. First, it is likely that a large parcel of the pioneering settlers and bonded laborers – who arrived in 1828 and 1840 – were already dead by then. Second, the census occurred immediately after the mass inflow of Italians, likely confounding the effects for other nationalities. Finally, the current analysis provides average results. Only by advancing the history of specific immigration waves will we be able to accommodate individual cases into this general framework. Studies on the local history of settlement colonies, of plantations employing bonded laborers and of public works
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making use of immigrant labor are promising in the global context of the Age of Mass Migration.
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