New CCPR Affiliate Carlo Medici on Immigration and Early Unionization
New CCPR Faculty Affiliate Carlo Medici, Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy, examines the economics of immigration, labor market institutions, and public sector organizations. In his recent paper, “Closing Ranks: Organized Labor and Immigration,” Professor Medici investigates how immigration influenced the origins and growth of organized labor in the United States between 1900 and 1920. Using digitized archival data from the proceedings of state federations of labor (state-level organizations of the American Federation of Labor) and patterns of chain migration, he constructs the first county-level dataset to capture how shifts in local immigrant populations affected union formation, providing new causal evidence linking immigration to the rise of organized labor in the United States.
As Professor Medici explains, “I study the origins of modern labor unions in the United States, and the factors that led to their emergence and growth. In this paper, I look at one specific factor—immigration, and I show that places that received larger immigrant inflows saw a greater increase in unionization.”
The study finds that counties with greater immigrant inflows relative to population exhibited higher rates of union activity, including more branches, larger memberships, and greater institutional presence. Professor Medici estimates that, in the absence of immigration, union density (measured as the number of union members as a fraction of the working-age population) between 1900 and 1920 would have been approximately 22% lower. Professor Medici elaborates, “There’s almost always a dual component in reactions to immigration: economic fears and social or cultural anxieties.” Immigrant inflows expanded the labor supply, exerting downward pressure on wages and generating localized competition for employment, prompting skilled workers to organize to safeguard their relative advantages, while “low-skilled workers, whose employment could be easily replaced, faced reduced bargaining power and struggled to sustain unions.”
Social and cultural factors also spurred collective action with the arrival of an array of immigrant populations, provoking defensive and sometimes exclusionary responses among native-born workers. Professor Medici linked historical immigration and unionization data with measures of local nativism and cultural segregation to capture places where resentment toward immigrants was likely stronger, finding that unionization was especially pronounced “in places that saw an influx of culturally distant immigrants, namely individuals from Southern and Eastern Europe.”
This research identifies immigration as a pivotal driver of early unionization and reveals how organized labor emerged from a combination of economic competition and social motivations. Although situated in a distinct historical era, these mechanisms continue to resonate today, as renewed attention to labor organizing reflects workers’ responses to modern pressures such as immigration, globalization, and technological change. Professor Medici plans to expand his analysis to examine how unions influenced the economic and social assimilation of immigrants and shaped the broader political economy throughout the 20th century.
