Gender Ratios of Immigration
Single, young, male laborers were initially the largest group using chain migration to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, each immigrant group maintained a unique composition due to circumstances in home countries, goals of migration, and American immigration laws. For example, Irish migration after 1880 had a 53.6% female majority, the only migrant group with that distinction. Irish men and women faced economic crisis, overpopulation, and problematic inheritance laws for large families, thereby compelling many of Ireland’s daughters to leave with her sons. Italian chain migration was initially wholly male based on intent to return, but became a source of family reunification when wives eventually immigrated. Chinese chain migration was almost exclusively male until 1946, when the Chinese War Brides Act allowed Chinese wives of American citizens to immigrate without regards to Chinese immigration quotas. Before that time, chain migration was limited to “paper sons” and actual sons from China. The imbalanced sex ratio of Chinese immigrants was due to Chinese exclusion laws and the inability to bring current wives or to marry and return to the United States, inhibiting the corrective measure of chain migration. When immigrant groups react to economic pull factors in the labor markets, chain migration via family has been used informally to balance out the gender ratio in ethnic immigrant communities.
Read more about this topic: Chain Migration
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