Socioeconomic selectivity of Japanese migration to the continental United States during the Age of Mass Migration

ABSTRACT

This study explores the socioeconomic selectivity of Japanese male immigrants who migrated to the continental United States (US) during the Age of Mass Migration (mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century) by comparing the US administrative records of Japanese long-term immigrants interned during World War 2 (WRA records) with a Japanese social survey of non-migrants (SSM survey). Both data contained information on educational attainment in Japan, the father's occupation in Japan, birth cohort, and birth prefecture. The analysis revealed positive educational selectivity of the long-term migration of both secondary- and tertiary school-educated Japanese males in all the migratory time periods. The selectivity of secondary school-educated Japanese males was especially strong and extended to males from all family backgrounds and all Japanese prefectures. Given the strong middle-class nature of secondary and tertiary education in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century in Japan, the results showed that first-generation Japanese immigrants were positively selected in terms of their socioeconomic status. These findings are important because the growing literature on socioeconomic selection in migration during the Age of Mass Migration has predominantly focused on transatlantic (Europe–US) migration and has largely neglected transpacific migration from Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• International migration
• Migrant selectivity
• Asian Americans
• Japanese Diaspora

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are War Relocation Authority (WRA) administrative records, the 1955 Social Stratification and Social Mobility Survey (1955 SSM) and the Japanese American Research Project survey (JARP). WRA records are stored in the United States National Archives Catalog (Record Group: 210) as ‘Records about Japanese Americans Relocated During World War II’. 1955 SSM data were provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Center for Social Research and Data Archives, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo with permission from the 2015 SSM Survey Management Committee. Restrictions apply to the availability of the SSM data, which were used under license for this study. The JARP data (Levine 2006) were accessed through Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), University of Michigan.

Acknowledgement

Research reported in this publication was supported by Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, which receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for training support (T32 HD007338) and for general support (P2C HD041020). I thank Margot Jackson, David Lindstrom, John Logan, Zhenchao Qian, Emily Rauscher, Michael White, the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on my earlier drafts. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America on 6 May 2021, conference of the Japanese Association for Mathematical Sociology on 8 March, 2021, Social Inequality Workshop at Brown University on 19 February, 2021, Migration Working Group at the Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University on 9 December, 2020 and Research on East Asian Demography and Inequality (READI) Student/Postdoc Meeting at Princeton University on 30 September, 2020 (all presentations online due to COVID-19 pandemic). I thank the participants of these conferences and workshops for their helpful questions and comments. I thank the 2015 SSM Survey Management Comittee for allowing me to use the 1955 SSM data through the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Center for Social Research and Data Archives, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hawaii was an independent kingdom until it officially became an American territory in 1900. Unlike emigration to the continental US, emigration to Hawaii was most often sponsored by companies recruiting labourers, and Japan maintained separate policies for emigration to Hawaii and the continental US (Spickard 1996, Chap. 2; Wakatsuki 1979).

2 According to Borjas (1989), negative selection occurs when there is smaller wage inequality in the destination country than in the origin country, while positive selection is observed when there is larger wage inequality in the destination country. This is because compressed wage distribution in the destination country ensures the less-skilled population against earning a very low wage, while dispersed wage distribution opens greater earning opportunities for the high-skilled population.

3 The general evidence from this period seems to gravitate toward negative selection in return migration. However, this differs greatly according to the origin country and the time period under study (Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2014; Ward 2017).

4 The Japanese government, in seeking ‘to be a colonizer rather than the colonized’ (Daniels 1988, 114), made efforts to have their subjects treated equally in the US; that is, alike the ‘white’ immigrants (Daniels 1988, chapter 4).

5 Read an episode introduced in Kido (2018, 199) between a Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and U.S. Representative and Japanese American Daniel Inouye.

6 Wakatsuki (1979) found that those Japanese who went to study in the continental US were less likely to return their passports compared to their peers who went to study in other countries including the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China.

7 The majority of the Japanese living in Hawaii were not interned, so they were not part of this study. However, those who first migrated to Hawaii and then later migrated to the West Coast were included in the WRA records. See also footnote 1.

8 The secondary and tertiary categories include those who dropped out after enrolling in that particular level of schooling (i.e. someone who dropped out of college will be coded as ‘tertiary’).

9 Unfortunately, categorisation into a more standard Japanese regional classification is difficult since the original WRA records containing information on exact prefecture of birth is not available.

10 In 1963, by relying on the Japanese American community and religious organisations, the JARP researchers attempted to list every known first-generation Japanese immigrant who had survived until 1962 in the continental US, and compiled a list of approximately 18,000 males and females. From the complied list, researchers drew a sample of 1,047, which was stratified by the county of residence, neighbourhood housing quality, and county-level population density of Japanese Americans (Levine 2006; Levine and Rhodes 1981, Chap. 3). While the JARP survey is a useful source for studying the Japanese American population, the survey is limited in that it did not account for those who had died by 1962 or those who were isolated from Japanese ethnic organisations (and thus were not included in the initial list of the 18,000 Japanese immigrants).

11 Non-linear positive educational selectivity also resonates with other empirical literature on contemporary migration such as in China (Lu, Liang, and Chunyu 2013) and France (Haddad 2020).