By Tyler Anbinder
New technology and the relatively recent opening of a unique set of papers—those of New York's Emigrant Savings Bank—make it possible to take a new, more reliable look at Irish immigrants' economic prospects. The Emigrant Savings Bank's customers were predominantly famine-era Irish Catholic immigrants—the white antebellum Americans who have been perceived to have had the least upward socioeconomic mobility. The bank's depositors were also residents of one of the teeming Eastern Seaboard cities where economic opportunities were, according to the historical scholarship, most scarce. Because the Irish are said to have had such dismal prospects, the surprisingly high balances found in their accounts (nearly 40 percent of Irish immigrant depositors saved the modern equivalent of $10,000, usually after less than a decade in America) have important implications for how we view the upward mobility of not only the Irish but of other white Americans in this period as well, because opportunities for non-Irish Americans were even greater than those of the famine immigrants. Some might argue that these results, from one bank in one city, do not really tell us much. But data from other banks indicates that the Emigrant Savings Bank's depositors were not atypical. One might therefore conclude that, in antebellum New York at least, the rags-to-riches “myth” was not such a myth after all. But for historians the real task is to discard entirely the rags-to-riches paradigm, including its more recent rags-to-respectability variant, and instead reconceptualize how we think about immigrant economic achievement in America.
Anbinder, Tyler. “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’: New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts.” Journal of American History 99 (2012): 741-70. Print.