I was reading some historical information about immigrants to the USA. And I found some interesting stats.
But one thing was interesting. It gave numbers of immigrants countries sent to the USA.
Sweden: 4.7 million
Norway 3.9 million
Finland 0.75 million
I noticed Denmark wasn’t even in the top 100. It only listed the top 100 countries, historically speaking.
OK I realize that numbers don’t mean much. After all Norway was part of Denmark and part of Sweden at one time. And Finland was part of Sweden then Russia, so some of those numbers could’ve been with other countries.
But since Denmark is much smaller and has a bigger population than Norway, Sweden or Finland, I’d think that the Danes would’ve sent people over.
So assuming this is correct, (I got the stats off the Ellis Island website), what gives? Why so few Danes, immigrated to America, while lots of Swedes, Norwegians and Finns.
Relative to other countries Denmark was already pretty well advanced in the 1800’s and had a fairly productive economy. Other than land for people who wanted to be farmers I’m not sure what the US really offered Danes. Escaping (relative) poverty and unemployment are what typically drive the desire to immigrate. If they were not under that much economic stress there would have been little reason to leave home.
Interesting, as the descendant of a Danish immigrant, I wish my family history was a little less fuzzy than it is. All I know is that he got here in the 1880s and ended up in a town that apparently was a center of Danish culture in North American, Neenah, Wisconsin, where a Danish synod of the Lutheran church was founded in 1878. Denmark is a pretty small place, why didn’t it have the population pressures that bigger places in Europe did? Were my Danish ancestors early birth control experts?
You’re correct in that Denmark sent much less immigrants to the US than either Sweden or Norway (though not less than Finland). However, the numbers you quoted are far too big. There is no way that during history Sweden or Norway could’ve sent 4 or 5 million people to America, and I believe these figures actually refer to the amount of current US residents who give Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish as their primary ancestry (that would be in US Census; look the 1990 numbers for Swedes and Norwegians. How the census numbers correspond to reality is hard to say…).
Library of Congress has a site about Scandinavian immigration to the US which gives believable numbers of more than one million Swedes, almost one million Norwegians, 360 000 Danes and some 300 000 Finns who have made the journey from their home countries to the United States throughout history.
Why Danes mostly stayed home when the Swedes and Norwegians emigrated in a big wave, then? Can’t say for sure, but I’ll give a comparison: there’s a page about Emigration from Finland to the US (in Finnish) on a Finnish genealogy site. This map shows the annual percentage of emigrants by municipality during the highest wave, the darkest areas having ten times more emigrants leaving for America than the lightest coloured ones. One single average-sized province, Vaasa Province in Western Finland, sent more than half of all the Finnish immigrants in the US, while the whole emigration business was negligible in southern and eastern provinces. Reasons were many: population growth was huge in the whole country except the more advanced southern parts, but in east and north this was balanced with abundance of not-yet-used forestlands, which could be converted for new agricultural uses; this kind of land wasn’t available in much of Vaasa Province anymore. Another use for overpopulation was industry, but most new industrial centers were in the south and got their workers from their own neighbourhoods. In fact, one of Ostrobothnias (region of Finland that corresponds partly with the old Vaasa Province) main sources of wealth was for a long time the production and export of tar. When the demand of tar lowered (as the age of sail came to its end), the area lost much of its economical base. Shrinking economy, overpopulation and lack of opportunities nearby led to mass emigration from this area.
I suppose one sees a lot of reasons like these when studying the differences between regions and countries during the greatest wave of European immigrants to the States, that is about 1865-1924, when by far the most European immigration occurred. Maybe the fact that Denmark already had a high population density for centuries helped it to deal with the high population growth of the 19th century in ways Sweden and Norway couldn’t.
Oh, and even though Norway was a part of Denmark before 1814 and after that part of Sweden before 1905, it was always regarded as a separate entity, so statistics talking about Norway should have it right. Finland was an integral part of Sweden before 1809 - which means the New Sweden colonists in 17th century Delaware are all called Swedes, even though many were from today’s Finland - but after being forced under the Russian rule Finland is also always regarded as a separate entity, sot he numbers should be right there too, because immigration from Finland to the US before 1809 is surely negligible.
I agree. The population of Norway is around 4.5 million today. In 1800 it was 880.000 and rapidly growing. Between 1825 and 1930 around 800.000 Norwegians emigrated to America, and some returned. The population fell during one emigration peak in 1881-1882, but nonetheless grew to 2.2 million by 1900.
We’re always told there are more Americans of Norwegian descent than there are Norwegians in Norway, this must be what your figures refer to.
Stats for Denmark: 270.000 emigrants to America between 1850 and 1914, total population around 2 million. Sweden: 1.3 million emigrants, and the population of Sweden still grew from 2.3 million in 1800 to 5.1 million in 1900.
A ton of Danes settled in Germany when Schleswig-Holstein was ceded over.
More seriously, would they more likely have settled in Norway or Sweden?
Here’s a Danish view on emigration to the US. It doesn’t mention the relative dearth of immigrants compared to the rest of Scandihoovia, but it cites population pressure and concentrated ownership of land. It also notes that most Danish emigrants came from Copenhagen and other towns, as opposed to rural areas.
Bornholm, the remote island where my great-grandparents came from, apparently also sent a disproportionate share of emigrants. True story: they changed their surnames upon arrival, because “Hansen” was just too ethnic.
Along those lines, the above article states that Danish immigrants assimilated and intermarried faster than other groups (but it doesn’t suggest why this was). This pattern might tend to reduce future immigration; people who are hesitant about leaving the home country might be more inclined to do so if there were homogeneous, familiar communities in the new country.
There’s the kitschy Solvang, but that’s almost a caricature. It would be like living at Epcot Center.
Denmark was better off than its neighbors to the north in the late 19th century. Some Norwegians and Swedes even emigrated to Denmark - not that Denmark was exactly rich, but there was work there.
Denmark is a fairly flat country with a lot of good soil. Norway is a mountainous country with mostly very thin soil. Sweden has a mix of the two. I’ve never looked up the statistics, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that Denmark has more good-quality arable land than Norway, in spite of being so much smaller. You can’t farm rock.
Not exactly a faulty assumption, just incomplete. The first emigrants left for religious reasons, but there were many reasons for the mass emigration, and “overcrowding” was an important factor.
Population growth in Scandinavia at that time was rapid. Farms were generally passed down to the eldest son rather than divided up for the next generation, and younger siblings would have to find a living as servants or tenant farmers. Industrialisation couldn’t keep up with the population growth, there was little work in the towns.
Large parts of Norway are mountainous and rocky, with little scope for expanding farms or clearing land for new farms. Denmark is better off for farmland, but their agriculture was largely based around grain production for export, and grain prices fell dramatically from around 1875 as North American grain export increased. Still, there was more scope for expanding farmland and creating employment.
There were also a number of factors that attracted immigrants to America. The promise of free farmland under the Homestead Act, higher wages, advertising and recruiting campaigns with emigration agents traveling from village to village, letters from family members who had made their fortune and often paid for relatives to follow. In some cases, people had their tickets paid by the government; it was cheaper to ship them off to America than try to support them at home.
