Czechs and Poles in Chicago: Pan-Slavism and the Origins of the Cermak Demecratic Machine, 1860-1931

While Poles rejected Pan-Slavic ideas in Europe, especially those that saw Russia as the protector of the Slavs, in Chicago a type of Pan-Slavism quickly emerged in the years after the Civil War. Polish and Czech immigrants forged a working relationship based on their common Slavic identity and on the realities of immigration, social class, and shared space in the city’s neighborhoods. These two groups also confronted anti-immigrant and anti-working class biases in the city. Their relationship with the German American community, a politically and culturally powerful group in Chicago, often proved to be problematic. During World War One, the Slavic coalition actively attacked Chicago’s Germans in an attempt to gain more political power. This coalition eventually resulted in the creation of a political machine under the leadership of Anton Čermak, an immigrant from Bohemia, who became the city’s only foreign-born mayor in 1931

Immigration and Inequality

Immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand low-skilled workers. Nevertheless, there is controversy over the appropriate theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect, and over the precise magnitudes involved. This paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality, focusing on evidence from cross-city comparisons in the U.S. While some researchers have claimed that a cross-city research design is inherently flawed, I argue that the evidence from cross-city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings based on aggregate time series data. In particular, cross-city and aggregate time series comparisons provide support for three key conclusions: (1) workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education; (2) “high school equivalent” and “college equivalent” workers are imperfect substitutes, with an elasticity of substitution on the order of 2; (3) within education groups, immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes. Together these results imply that the average impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of U.S. natives are small. The effects on overall wage inequality (including natives and immigrants) are larger, reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives. Even so, immigration accounts for a small share (5%) of the increase in U.S. wage inequality between 1980 and 2000