atypical migrations of the nineteenth century—those caused by famine in Ireland before the Civil War, the failed revolutions of 1848, and the Russian pogroms that began in 1881 with the assassination of Czar Alexander II—as representative. Most immigrants were not fleeing persecution or famine; they chose to come, although their choice was shaped by circumstances. They wanted a better life and left regions that offered them little hope of one. Their arrivals tracked (although calculations are not precise) the rise and fall of the American economy. There were no direct measures of GDP in the
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