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An Evaluation of Estimates of Immigration into Canada in the Late Nineteenth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

James Pickett
James Pickett*
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde
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Extract

The current widespread concern with economic growth has stimulated much quantitative study of the economic history of now-developed countries, including Canada. Population change has been an important part of the Canadian record and considerable attention has been given to international migration. Unfortunately, in the period now of greatest interest–say between Confederation and the eve of the First World War–insufficient attention was paid in Canada and other countries to the problems of keeping accurate and comprehensive records of migration. As a result serious doubts must attach to any migration statistics which still survive from this period. These doubts must extend to the Canadian official figures, even though immigrant statistics go back to 1852, are ostensibly complete in that the annual series is thereafter unbroken, and ostensibly genuine in that immigrants are defined as “those who have never been in Canada before and who declare their intention to live there permanently.” In fact, the Canadian official record of migration in the second half of the nineteenth century suffers from at least three serious defects: the immigration figures are lacking in internal consistency; the unguarded propinquity of the United States created more problems in counting migrant heads than Canadian (or American) authorities could solve; and there are no data at all on emigration.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , November 1965 , pp. 499 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1965

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Footnotes

*

A first draft of this paper was written at the Institute for Economic Research at Queen's University and I am grateful to the Institute for its support. I am also grateful to Glasgow University and the Houblon-Norman Fund for travel grants. My thanks are also due to Professors A. K. Cairncross and William G. Shepherd for useful comments on an earlier paper on British migration to Canada and to Professors K. A. H. Buckley and Yien-I-Tu for helpful discussion of the present paper. I am, of course, alone responsible for the argument and conclusions of the paper.

References

1 For detailed discussion of the deficiencies of the records see Thomas, Brinley, Migration and Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1954), Part IIGoogle Scholar, and Ferenczi, Imre, International Migrations, I (NewYork, 1929).Google Scholar

2 Keyfitz, Nathan, “Growth of the Canadian Population,” Population Studies, vol. II, No. 1, 1950.Google Scholar

3 McDougall, D. M., “Immigration into Canada, 1851–1920,” this Journal, 27, no. 2 (05 1961), 162–75.Google Scholar

4 “Comment,” ibid., 242–3.

5 See Migration and Economic Growth, 254.

6 That is, the beginning population times the weighted death rate times ten.

7 That is, arrivals times the average length of stay times the weighted death rate.

8 The numbers of deaths in the cohorts of emigrants from Canada were found by taking the number of emigrants times their average length of stay times the weighted average of Brinley Thomas's age-specific death rates for the foreign-bom in the United States, 1891–1900 and 1901–10. Deaths among the Canadian-born population enumerated in the US at census years were calculated on the basis of the 1911 age distribution of the foreign-born in Canada together with Brinley Thomas's age-specific death rates for the foreign-bom in the United States 1891–1900.

9 Using improbably high death rates to estimate the foreign-born component of emigration from Canada will understate emigration from among the foreign-born. It will thus overstate Canadian-born emigration to the United States and therefore overstate the number of returning Canadians from the United States. This overstatement will be offset to some extent by the understatement which will arise from using a larger-than-true cohort to calculate the number of deaths among immigrants from Canada to the United States in the course of a decade. On balance, however, overstatement will prevail. In terms of the identity, if the amount of overstatement of then the amount of overstatement in will be = X – d.X where d, the death rate, is a fraction, so that X – d.X must be positive. A similar argument can be developed for improbably low death rates and understatement. The assumption that death in a decade among Canadians resident in the US at the beginning of the decade as given by the expression overstates the number of deaths because it assumes, incorrectly, that the total beginning population is exposed to death in each and all of the ten years. The argument in the text implies, not unreasonably, that Brinley Thomas's death rates, when neither over- nor understated, should be regarded as being fairly firm.

10 Willcox, W. F., International Migrations, II (New York, 1931).Google Scholar