Becoming American: How Context Shaped Intermarriage during the Great Migration to the United States at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Although intermarriage is a commonly used indicator of immigrant integration into host societies, most research has focused on how individual characteristics determine intermarriage. This study uses the 1-910 IPUMS census sample to analyze how contextual factors affected intermarriage among European immigrants in the United States. We use newly-available complete-count census mircodata to construct contextual measures at a much lower level of aggregation than in previous studies. Our results confirm most findings in previous research relating to individuallevel variables. We also find important associations between contextual factors and different marital outcomes. The relative size and sex ratio of the origin group, ethnic diversity, the share of the native born white population, and the proportion of life time spent by immigrants in the U.S. are all associated with exogamy. These patterns are highly similar across genders and immigrant generations. Acknowledgements: Previous versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, San Diego, May 2015, and the Social Science History Association, Baltimore, November 2015. We thank Stewart Tolnay and Brian Gratton for constructive comments and suggestions. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Swedish Research Council through the Linnaeus Center for Economic Demography, Lund University, support from the Minnesota Population Center (P2C HD041023), funded through a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and NICHD grant 1 R01-HD082120-0