To migrate or not to migrate: the effect of institutional reforms on immigration decisions of Ottoman citizens to the US

ABSTRACT

In the age of mass migration, the US became economically crucial with the development of Atlantic trade and attracted labour flows from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire was suffering severe economic and political problems. The Ottoman citizens of various ethnic origins, such as Turks, Jews, Armenians and Arabs, moved to different countries, including the US, for economic and political reasons. This paper examines the effect of institutional reforms in the Ottoman Empire during the Second Constitutional Era on immigration decisions of different ethnic groups to the US. Data come from the US census data of IPUMS (the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) for 1910. The empirical results show that the institutional reforms could reduce emigration from the Ottoman Empire through granting additional civil liberties. However, this effect works heterogeneously for different ethnic groups. This result points out the importance of institutional improvements in home countries on reducing migration outflows.

KEYWORDS:

• Ottoman Empire
• migration
• reforms
• ethnicity
• conscription
• political instability

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mustafa Çalışkan for his help and anonymous referees for their suggestions. Authorship contributions: Conceptualisation, methodology, investigation, validation, review and editing by Hanedar and Yaldız Hanedar, Data collection and processing, review and editing by Uysal, Yiğit, Gür Yiğit.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It is argued that lack of freedom and equality among the Ottoman citizens provoked non-Muslims’ nationalist movements before 1908 and encouraged non-Muslims to flee their homelands (Bali 2006; Baycar 2015).

2 One part of historical literature argues that after 1908 Muslims also immigrated to the US to escape compulsory military services like non-Muslims (Acehan 2015, 60; Baycar 2015, 95–96). Rather than migrating to the US, living in mountains, and taking a different nationality could be the other options for non-Muslims after 1908 (Zürcher 1999; Baycar 2016, 23).

3 The table containing the numbers of Ottoman non-Muslims and Ottoman Muslims migrating by years is given in the Appendix.

4 See Bureau of Statistics, Under the Direction of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor (1910).

5 See Hanedar and Uysal (2020) and Hanedar et al. (2022) for further discussion on the reliability of data.

6 Pie graphs that present migration flows for ethnic origins before and after the Second Constitution are given in the Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

A. Ö. Hanedar would like to acknowledge the financial support by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), [grant number 220K286].