Health and Well-Being of the Irish in England

My paper with James Smith and Alan Fernihough is available as an IZA Working Paper linked here. I am currently working on a funding proposal to directly survey the Irish-born living in England, and in London particularly. Very happy to correspond with people interested in this group.

Exporting Poor Health: The Irish in England

The Irish-born population in England is in worse health than both the native population and the Irish population in Ireland, a reversal of the commonly observed healthy migrant effect. Recent birth-cohorts living in England and born in Ireland, however, are healthier than the English population. The substantial Irish health penalty arises principally for cohorts born between 1920 and 1960. This paper attempts to understand the processes that generated this migrant health pattern. Our results suggest a strong role for early childhood conditions and economic selection in driving the dynamics of health differences between the Irish-born migrants and White English populations.

The Irish and America's Law and Order Problem

Immigration: America's nineteenth century "law and order problem"?

New NBER Working Paper No. 16266
Howard Bodenhorn, Carolyn M. Moehling, Anne Morrison Piehl
Issued in August 2010

Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violent crime in cities and have relied on data with serious limitations regarding nativity information. We analyze administrative data from Pennsylvania prisons, with high quality information on nativity and demographic characteristics. The latter allow us to construct incarceration rates for detailed population groups using U.S. Census data. The raw gap in incarceration rates for the foreign and native born is large, in accord with the extremely high concern at the time about immigrant criminality. But adjusting for age and gender greatly narrows that observed gap. Particularly striking are the urban/rural differences. Immigrants were concentrated in large cities where reported crime rates were higher. However, within rural counties, the foreign born had much higher incarceration rates than the native born. The interaction of nativity with urban residence explains much of the observed aggregate differentials in incarceration rates. Finally, we find that the foreign born, especially the Irish, consistently have higher incarceration rates for violent crimes, but from 1850 to 1860 the natives largely closed the gap with the foreign born for property offenses.

Interview on Global Irish

Via Colm, here is a link to an interview with Elizabeth Malcolm on the reasons for Irish migration throughout history and the effect the Irish had on various countries.