"Immigration's impact on American income distribution has been much less emphasized in the scholarship on turn-of-the-century immigration. Income inequality appears to have grown over the period of mass immigration, but it is not clear what role immigration played in this development. Key conclusions in the literature are *There is no evidence that immigrants permanently lowered the real wage of resident workers overall in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. *There is no evidence that international immigrants increased the rate of unemployment, took jobs from residents, or crowded resident workers into less attractive jobs. *There is no evidence that the early twentieth-century immigrant community placed a disproportionate burden on public charitable agencies or private philanthropies. * The turn-of-the-century educational system does not appear to have been an important arena for transferring resources between the foreign and native-born populations. * There is some evidence that immigration may have reduced regional differences in income inequality. On the other hand, there is no consensus regarding the impact of immigration on racial wage differentials. A number of scholars argue that the flow of European-born workers into the rapidly growing industrial cities of the North may have helped to delay the migration of blacks from the South to the North. If it delayed black migration, then immigration from abroad also would have delayed the convergence of black and white incomes."