In the US, there is a preponderance of Europeans along the east coast, a preponderance of Asians on the west coast, and a preponderance of Mexicans in the south/southwest. The reasons for this seem obvious: it was the first spot they hit when they came to the US, and they basically said “this’ll do.”
But what about other groups? Why did Germans and Scandinavians gravitate to the upper midwest? Why so many Poles in Detroit? Why are there so many Hmong and Somali in Minneapolis/Saint Paul?
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In some cases, they already knew people from back home who had emigrated earlier, and went and found their friends who were already established. Or, new immigants went to places where there was a substantial number of other from their own country, where they would find people of their own culture. There might have even been local syndicates, established to help newcomers from the same country. It was well known, for example, in Poland, that if someone went to Chicago, there was a Polish community to smooth their transition into American life. So more and more Poles went to Chicago.
In the case of the Hmong and Somalis, I believe there were American organizations that took it upon themselves to establish refugee centers, and people arriving from those countries were given assistance to relocate there.
Here’s a map of the distribution of ethnic groups in the U.S.:
Germans are spread all over the U.S., but particularly in the upper half of the country, so saying that they gravitated to the upper Midwest isn’t very accurate. Poles are spread over many cities, not just Detroit. The only county with a plurality of Poles is in Pennsylvania. You might want to consult that map before asking this question.
The fact that Poles aren’t a plurality in Detroit is not really indicative of anything. It’s a huge city. Wayne County is 6.8% Polish, which is a large number considering Poland is a relatively small country. That’s also not taking into account the large number of people who moved out of Wayne County in 1981 (after an eminent domain seizure.)
jtur88 basically answered the OP’s question. New immigrant groups form enclaves where they can retain a measure of their own culture, eat their traditional foods, and so on (and at earlier times in history were often forced into enclaves.)
No there isn’t. Not only are there far more Hispanics, there are far more Caucasians and, I am fairly sure, a good few more African-Americans too.
Who are all those people (pale yellow) who are of “American” but not “American Indian” descent?
I have to go back 6-10 generations to have ancestors who lived anywhere other than the U.S. If one of them hadn’t traced and written down our ancestry (mostly to England), I’d have to answer that question American but not American Indian.
Mostly southern whites, whose ancestors came almost entirely from the British Isles, and self-identified as “American”, because their ancestors arrived so long ago, they have no recollection of an ancestor who was not just plain American. Relatively speaking, very few whites in the American South identify with any culture that might have preceded their family recollection. By contrast, Whites in the northern states, to distinguish themselves from immigrant cultural identities, often call themselves English or Scottish, often depending on what they understand to be the origin of their surname…
These data are entirely based on the responses on US Census questionnaires, and are never challenged. If a person says they are American, they are put down as American.
By the way, a huge number of young Americans nowadays have ino dea what their ancestry is.
The distribution of German and Irish immigrants seems to me somewhat anomalous considering the demography of the areas from which they came and their professions in the home country.
Germany would have been one of the more urbanized countries of Europe when major immigration started in the early 1800s (recognizing that many came even earlier). Although many did settle in urban areas (among them some of my ancestors in New York), large numbers became farmers. At first they concentrated in Pennsylvania and other middle Atlantic states, perhaps because of proximity to the ports of New York and Philadelphia. As land became scarcer in the East, they began to settle in the Midwest and even Texas.
In contrast, the majority of Irish immigrants in the big surge after the Potato Famine in the 1830s would have been impoverished farmers. However, they concentrated in coastal cities like New York and Boston, where they worked as manual laborers, rather than continue as farmers. Perhaps the Famine had permanently soured them on trying to work the land. As the map shows, Irish Americans are still concentrated in the Northeast (although the later wave of Italian immigrants has replaced them as a plurality in the port cities themselves).
Scandinavian immigrants came somewhat later than the Germans, and were mainly farmers, so it’s reasonable that they gravitated to the upper Midwest, where there was still plenty of land available and the climate would not have been as daunting to them as it might have been to some others.
Jewish immigrants also concentrated in urban area. This makes sense for those from Western Europe, where the Jewish population was largely urban. However, I’ve thought it was very curious that very few Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe or Russia, who would largely have been agricultural peasants, attempted to take up farming in the Midwest but instead settled in cities.
Even with that explanation, there are anomalies. For example, much of upper New England is shown as French, except one county in ME is French Canadian. Well, they are nearly all French Canadian. Just as most of the French is LA are Acadians. But the amazing thing is how much of the country has German ancestry. One German ruler (I think Bismark) said that the most important thing that happened in the 19th century was that the US became English speaking.
And rural Germans on the East Coast were not, and are not, limited to Pennsylvania - there were large German farming communities in Maryland and Virginia as well. Rockingham County, VA is in many ways sort of an Appalachian version of Lancaster County, PA. Ethnic Germans everywhere, farms, farms, and more farms. Loudoun County, VA and Fauquier County, VA also have had a significant German heritage, although more recent migrations have changed them dramatically in recent years.
This is not true, not matter what definition or time scales you use.
The vast majority of Germans at that time were, like the vast majority of Americans at that time, farmers. This pdf has urbanization percentages on pp 4 and 5. Germany was 10th even using 2000 people as the definition of a city in 1800 and 7th in 1850.
And America was even less urbanized than that. There was simply no place for large numbers of German farming immigrants in cities for the first half of the 19th century. The expectation for most immigrants to the U.S. up until massive industrialization started in the North (started around 1840, massive after the Civil War) was that they would go to the unclaimed lands out west, with the definition of west first being western New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, then the states in the Northeast Territories, then into the Midwest. That’s why so much of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio contains Amish and Mennonite communities today.
Scandinavians came later, in response to a different set of pushes and pulls.
Each group of immigrants has to be treated individually. You need to look at what their backgrounds were, why they had to or wanted to leave, when their peak emigration was, where they were encouraged to settle, and where they were discouraged from settling. Most of the Old South, e.g., discouraged immigrants, already having a pool of cheap, exploitable labor, as well as a lack of industry to absorb jobs. Some groups stayed in New York City because of the bilingual communities that flourished there, others look at those entrenched others and moved outward to smaller cities where they could form a significant percentage. Many railroads boosted travel by offering cheap (and one-way) tickets to immigrants, promoting the harsh prairie in gaudy and lying terms, and ignoring those who got dumped into, say, mid-Kansas to find a different reality.
There’s no one answer. Every group has an individual history.
I doubt that. The potato crop failed all over Europe, not just in Ireland. The difference was simply that the Irish diet was more dependent on potatoes. Ireland was still producing more than enough food to feed its populace; it was just going for export.
The people fleeing the potato famine weren’t just farmers. It was everyone too poor to afford anything better than potatoes.
Yes, but the majority of Irish would have been farmers in any case. Nevertheless, a large proportion ended up as laborers in cities instead of taking up farming in the new country.
OK, “preponderance” was the wrong word to use, I guess. I did not intend to claim that there were more Asians on the west coast than any other demographic group. What I meant to say was that (for example) Asians are a higher percentage of the population on the west coast than they are elsewhere in the country. For example: Seattle is 13.8% Asian, and Minneapolis is only 5.6% Asian.
This data is very flawed, because it presumes one ethnicity per person when that in fact is far from the case. It’s the equivalent of using the Y-chromosome to paint a complete picture. Further, if the ancestry is more than a few generations back, many people are unclear. My grandfather always said he was Irish, which was partly true, but mostly (in a genetic sense) to entirely (in a cultural sense) false.
Also, another thing to keep in mind is that ethnic “maps” of the US are largely drawn from self-identification surveys. E.g. you are “German” if and only if you claim to be German. What percentage of your blood has to be German to qualify as “really German” is not defined anywhere. If you live in an area that had significant German settlement and you are descended from that community through your mother’s father’s mother, it is likely that you will self-identify as a member, even if the rest of your ancestry is Italian. If two of your grandparents were German farmers in Ohio but your parents were hippies who spent their life in San Francisco, where you grew up, it is less likely that you will self-identify as being ethnically German.
What percentage of white people in the US have some German ancestry? Probably 95% or more. Even recent immigrants probably had some mixing in the “old country” that would have injected some German DNA. What percentage of white people self-identify as “ethnic” German-Americans? That’s what you see in survey data.
I know that in Texas, in particular, there were entrepreneurs who advertised farmland, etc… in Germany, in order to get immigrants to come and get the land.
The more recent wave of Asian immigrants to Texas (prim. Vietnamese) came initially due to economic opportunity and a similar climate and geography to their home. After a while, there was a sort of critical mass built up where the presence of the community attracted immigrants by its very presence.
What does relatively small mean? Poland currently has over 38,000,000 people. That’s about 6 times the population of Ireland (whole island) and a much bigger population than many other major European nations.
It means substantially smaller than Mexico, Germany, the UK and other major US source states. Beyond that, Poland was much smaller during the periods of mass emigration (when it was a sovereign state at all). Poles are the second largest “nationally identifiable” demographic group in Wayne County (after Germans).