The Economics of Migrant Travel on Steamships

TEXT EXCERPTS from Business of Transatlantic Migration,

chapter 2, pp. 39-48

The shipping of migrants to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries amounted to the high-risk core of a high-risk industry...The biggest potential problem facing migrants was that of not being able to find work in America...the most severe threat to shipping company viability was the risk of a sharp fall in migrant passengers during job market slumps... 

Migrant traffic constituted nearly 90 percent of the North Atlantic transport companies' passenger flow and generated half of their total revenues...

Expatriate migrant workers were over-represented in temporary jobs and cyclical industries...A change of few percent up or down in gross production can tip an economy from expansion into recession or vice versa. Changes in the rate of transatlantic migration could be many times greater...

Heavy fixed costs and dependency upon migrant traffic mean that the riskiness of the migration endeavor translated almost directly into financial riskiness for the transport lines' stakeholders. Available figures of the major North Atlantic passenger shipping lines show a close correlation between corporate operating profits and the powerful ebb and flow of immigrant arrivals in America."