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.A party based on nativism eventhough the party might have also reached out to voters on other grounds would have been more attractive to the native born in the early 1850sthan at any other time.Thus, at the least, it is likely that the underlyingdeterioration of economic conditions for the native born, due in largepart to the large volume of immigration, set the stage for the successof the Know-Nothings during 1854 and 1855.In turn, the absence oflarge-scale immigration both before and after the early 1850s caused thenativists to have only minor electoral success during the remainder of theantebellum period.Immigrants, the Capital Stock, and Economic GrowthAn important aspect of immigration was that a large portion of theimmigrant stream was composed of adults of working age.Thus, many The Effects of Immigration on the United States 219immigrants arrived ready to work, where the U.S.economy did nothave to expend resources raising the individuals to working age.In thisway, immigration contributed to the growth of the capital stock in theUnited States.Neal and Uselding make the point succinctly: This contri-bution, which would have been lost with a native labour supply of equalsize, derives from the pool of resources released, for alternative uses, fromthe task of rearing children. 86 The economy could then do other thingswith these resources.Presumably, some portion of the freed resourceswould be used to undertake investment and thus increase the size of thestock of capital beyond what it otherwise would have been.With a largercapital stock, workers would be more productive and per capita incomesin the United States would increase.Neal and Uselding estimated the contribution immigration made toaugmenting the capital stock.For immigration starting in 1790, their pro-cedure involved determining the total amount of resources the U.S.econ-omy would have expended on raising to working age the adult immigrantswho arrived, after accounting for the deaths that would have occurredbefore reaching working age.In order to perform these calculations, theyassumed the size of the population would have been the same had immi-gration not occurred.87 Neal and Uselding then estimated the fraction ofthese resources the economy used for investment purposes, and appliedthis fraction to the saved resources.Note the implicit assumption thatnatives and immigrants saved the same percentage of their income.Theirprocedure accounted not only for the direct increase in the capital stockbut also for the compounding that arose from the positive gain the newcapital would have provided.Their estimates indicated that the savings from immigration accounted for between 4.7 percent and 9.1 percent ofthe total size of the capital stock in 1850.88 Because these percentages arenot insubstantial, they concluded that immigration made an importantcontribution to the growth of the U.S.economy after 1790.86Neal and Uselding, Immigration, p.69.Carter and Sutch, Historical Perspectives, p.332, refer to this gain as a gift. Also see Uselding, Conjectural Estimates, whoprovides estimates of the total amount of human capital that immigrants brought withthem to the United States.87The view that immigrants lowered the birth rates of natives and replaced them one-for-one is called the Walker thesis.Although few economic historians believe this viewtoday, adopting this approach simplified the analysis and provided a lower bound forthe effects of immigration on economic growth.88The difference arises from whether they compounded the gains from the new capital at3%or 6%.See Neal and Uselding, Immigration, p.85. 220 Mass Migration Under SailAs might be expected, the data and procedures used to reach theseresults have not gone unchallenged.In particular, Gallman leveled a num-ber of criticisms
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