In the decade and a half before World War I, nearly eleven million Europeans migrated to the United States, the cresting wave of an even larger movement across the Atlantic to the Americas between 1840 and 1914. Why did so many come? Real wages twice as high in the United States as in even the most advanced European countries, as well as religious, ethnic, and political discrimination in the old country, were certainly basic motives. Recent historians of migration, however, have sought to modify or challenge this “push-pull” explanation by focusing more on the “processes” of migration, including the “agency” of migrants, the fluidity of their identities, and the ways in which “social capital” and kin and ethnic networks fostered trust across vast distances. Thanks to Drew Keeling's valuable new study, we can now add another element to the mix: risk management.

Keeling frames his account by explaining that the system of frequent, regular transatlantic crossings by shipping lines between the 1870s and 1914 occupied a middle ground between two very different migration eras. Previously, weakly commercialized economies and slow, but above all irregularly departing, ships had made the financing and logistics of a crossing so uncertain as to be not worth considering for the great majority of Europeans. Ever since 1914, on the other hand, states have taken a much more active role in limiting migration. In the middle period from the 1870s to 1914, however, migration was both economically feasible for many more than before and legally almost completely unencumbered (at least for Europeans).

So why, Keeling asks, didn't many more millions migrate, if wages remained at least twice as high in the United States as in Europe? Why did the U.S. government twice (1896, 1913) come close to imposing quantitative restrictions on immigration but both times refrain? Why did the “big four” steamship lines hardly reduce their fares (while cargo rates fell by 90% over the nineteenth century) and instead improve passenger accommodations? The answer to all these questions, Keeling says, is risk.

Against the prospect of higher wages, a potential migrant had to weigh the risk of becoming unemployed during one of the frequent business downturns, especially since most migrants found work as unskilled, expendable laborers. Under such circumstances, kin and other networks provided a kind of community insurance, but the ultimate recourse was a return to lower-cost Europe. At the height of the 1907–1908 recession, returns to the old country soared—whereas earlier eastbound traffic made up an average of 40% of westbound traffic, it now rose to 190%. While Keeling's detailed, quantitative study of these responses to downturns is convincing, his use of the risk paradigm to explain migrants’ initial decision to go west lacks enough specificity to be completely compelling, even if the approach seems quite plausible. That is, what is the evidence for a priori consideration of risk in the decision to emigrate as opposed to on-the-spot reactions to unemployment? A more extensive discussion of remittances would also have been helpful in this regard.

U.S. government immigration policy is the second area to which Keeling applies the risk paradigm. He skillfully shows that both Republicans and Democrats were “fundamentally ambivalent” (p. 151) about high levels of immigration. The former included business interests (for) and New England patricians such as Henry Cabot Lodge (against). The latter encompassed southern whites (against), unions (against), and recently immigrated workers (for). Following a path of what Keeling calls “calculated ambiguity” by both parties, Washington paid lip service to restrictionists’ worries about immigration, while gradually restricting the inflow of various categories of “undesirable” immigrants (the sick, the politically radical, those likely to become a “public charge”—but not particular ethnic groups) (p. 195). Even if Keeling's characterization of this “quieter consensus” favoring quality control over quantitative restriction as a form of “pragmatic risk management” (p. 160) overstretches the concept, his analysis of immigration politics remains astute.

It is in the third area—the actual business of shipping migrants across the Atlantic, which constitutes the heart of Keeling's study—that the risk paradigm succeeds most unambiguously. Here Keeling has done astonishing legwork. Combining the records of the shipping lines and U.S. immigration authorities, he has compiled a “Voyage Database” that records sixty pieces of information about each of the 18,000 journeys between Europe and the four largest U.S. east coast ports (New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia) from mid-1899 to mid-1914. Keeling uses this enormous database in conjunction with the internal records of the “big four” shipping lines to paint a convincing portrait of one of the biggest industries of the time. The extremely high fixed costs (ships, coal, crew) and the need to order vessels years in advance of their delivery, by which time the market might have changed, compelled the companies to do their utmost to fill their ships to capacity. More generally, frequent economic downturns in the United States depressed demand for European workers, making the business of migration highly cyclical.

To mitigate these risks the firms pursued several strategies. They formed a cartel that divided up the share of steerage passengers and—with one disastrous exception, in 1904—avoided fare wars. They improved the quarters and amenities of second- and first-class rooms—which were not covered by the cartel agreement—in order to compete for tourists, who comprised 20% of all travelers. Finally, they tried to increase the number of interchangeable berths: by increasing the number of second-class cabins and by creating “closed” steerage cabins, the shipping lines could appeal either to frugal tourists or to upscale migrants, depending on demand. Though Keeling tantalizes the reader with the “plausible hypothesis” that these improved conditions affected transatlantic migration patterns (p. xvii), in the end he has to acknowledge that they probably didn't (p. 239).

Thanks to Keeling's data collection—the Voyage Database, which Keeling should make available online, as well as other quantitative information helpfully presented in several appendices—migration scholars have a treasure trove of new material with which to work. His risk paradigm is innovative and could be fruitfully integrated with studies of social capital and networks.