Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the US

Similarly, being exposed to an Italian church for five more years reduces residential 2These are: county population, the urban, the Black, the Italian, the Irish, and other Europeans share of the population, labor force participation, the manufacturing share, and the number of years a county had been connected to the railroad. [...] Louis (MO) to Philadelphia (PA) to Thornton (RI).14 On the other hand, the various Italian religious orders had to be granted permission to open a church by the bishop of the diocese – again, a process whose outcome and duration were highly uncertain.15 In yet other instances, the establishment of a church depended on the entrepreneurial spirit of the missionaries. [...] Such coordination was often promoted by priests, who would “ascend the pulpit after the Gospel for the reading of the Sunday announcements to inform the people about feasts, days of fast and abstinence, meetings of societies, the dates of the monthly communion”(Francesconi, 1983).20 The arrival of Italian Catholic churches may have also increased the salience of the immigrant community, triggering. [...] 4 Empirical Strategy 4.1 Difference-in-Differences To study the effects of Italian churches on the assimilation of Italian immigrants, we match the county of residence of an individual in a given Census year to the arrival of Italian priests and churches within the previous decade. [...] 36These are: county population, the urban, the Black, the Italian, the Irish, and other Europeans share of the population, labor force participation, the manufacturing share, and the number of years a county had been connected to the railroad.