On March 29 The Economist featured the work of Dr. Andreas Ferrara and his co-authors for a piece "America’s other great migration: White migrants from America’s South turned its northern politics rightwards."
"After America’s civil war, millions of black Americans left the country’s southern states. Many were newly freed from slavery. They sought, and often found, better and safer lives, in manufacturing centres such as Detroit and New York. Known as the country’s “Great Migration”, this flow of people transformed the culture and economies of the places where migrants arrived. It also gave politics in northern cities an enduring push left. But this was not the only great migration. Between 1900 and 1940, roughly 5m southern whites left former Confederate states and neighbouring Oklahoma."
"In a peer-reviewed study to be published later this year, Samuel Bazzi, Andreas Ferrara, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas Pearson and Patrick Testa used digitised census records to track these white migrants’ journeys. They found that this group was not just greater in number, but, as they spread their culture and attitudes, perhaps in political influence, too."
Within a few days a Tweet about the Economist piece had been seen over 1.7 million times.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics article by Bazzi, Ferrara, Fiszbein, Pearson, and Testa is now available online.