there’s a reputation in Canada, for example, that large numbers of Russians, Ukrainians, etc. settled in the two western provinces - Manitoba and Saskatchewan - because at the time the area was being settled, at the opening of the west and the completion of the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railroad) homestead land was there for the taking about the time that those areas of Europe were being exploited for immigrants. Canada wanted the land populated, and that was the area with a large population that had not already unloaded a flood of immigrants on the new world.
IIRC, this is how for example, the Swedes ended up in the Wisconsin-Minnesota area; when that area was being offered for settlement, that’s where the most immigrant farmers were found. (Wasn’t this the basis for the movie “The Immigrants”?)
As for others, like the Jewish or Italian population n New York - like the Irish population in Montreal, that’s where the boats landed during the time of heaviest migration. Then people tended to band together; little Italy in New York, Chinatowns all over the USA, etc.
Plus, once industrialization started, and by the 1880’s much of the Midwest USA had been farmed out to homesteads, the demand was for industrial workers, so the US immigrants settled in the bigger cities where the industry was and their friends could find them work.
No, the Irish moved and formed large groups all over the northeast. Boston was and is more Irish than New York. The Jews were the only group that didn’t form comparatively large populations elsewhere.
Every immigrant group from every nation in the entire history of immigration from colonial times through today shows this behavior. It’s as universal as behavior gets.
In most cases, people self-identified according to their culture/language, not their national place of origin. For example, my grandparents were Lithuanian,and spoke only Lithuanian, but their landing papers say they were Russian, because at the time Lithuania had no national identity, and they were Russian citizens.
So regardless of how large or small Poland, as a nation, fluctuated, Polish people were Polish, spoke Polish, and were Polish by cultural affinity, even if their immediate place of origin was under some other flag at that particular time.
Here’s a map of the distribution of Polish-Americans around the U.S.:
Here’s a table of the percentage of Polish-Americans in each state:
There is actually a smaller proportion in Michigan than in Wisconsin. Fourteen states, all more or less in the north and east, are more than 4% Polish-American. What the OP said was “Why so many Poles in Detroit?”. As I said above, many American cities that are more or less in the north and east have significant proportions of Polish-Americans, so the question in the OP wasn’t well defined.
It’s true that ethnic maps are largely drawn from self-identification surveys. So what? The OP started by asking about Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Hmong, and Somalis. What can the OP mean by this except self-identification? I presume that Machine Elf hasn’t done genetic testing on everyone. I presume that Machine Elf is making generalizations about where people live based on their self-identification.
The problems I noted above: self-identification surveys usually presume one ethnicity, when Americans tend to have several, and that most people don’t have clue number one when it comes to ethnicity. Some will list their actual ethnicity, some will list an ancestor’s ethnicity, some will list the country their ancestor came from, or the country they THINK their ancestor came from. Some will choose by their last name, others by the grandparent they remember best, and still others by the group that has the most positive associations for them.
An identity map is interesting and useful, but it takes a social scientist (which the census bureau emphatically is not) to map ethnicity.
It depends largely on why you want the population data. When you ask “What percentage of South Dakota is German?” you have to ask yourself why you want to know that. Are you interested in finding high concentrations of Deutsch DNA because you are seeking an organ donor for a tourist from Berlin who has fallen gravely ill in the US? Are you interested in starting up a German cultural fair and want to know where you are likely to find a large number of people who would be interested in participating in such a thing? Are you looking for German language teachers for your school and hoping to find a German speaking community to recruit in?
Again, Machine Elf asked about American ethnic groups in the OP. I presume that he hasn’t done genetic testing on people. So what he must be talking about is self-identification. We’re presumably trying to answer the question as Machine Elf asked it, not talk endlessly about what ethnic identity means.
A number of years ago I saw a book which would exactly answer the OP. It was an atlas of immigration. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the name of it and it was long enough ago it wouldn’t have some of the newer immigrant groups such as Somalis.
In it, every immigrant group had their own map showing anywhere there was a concentration of that group. This is better than the map linked to above which only shows what group dominated a given county. For instance, that map doesn’t show there was a goodly number of Finns who settled in Astoria OR or Norwegians in Ballard WA (now a neighborhood of Seattle). This atlas did have that level of detail.
Naturally, I looked up my own ethnic group (Belgian) and was interested to find that the biggest concentration was in and around Green Bay. That matched up with the family history, since that’s where my great-grandfather settled when he came to the US in the 1890s (Belgians in that area actually go back a good 50 years earlier). Whether this explains the prevalence of cheeseheads in that area is an exercise left to the reader.
While this may be true enough for individuals, I don’t think it has a major impact on broad patterns like those shown in the map linked to by Wendell Wagner in relation to the question asked in the OP. I’m not seeing large anomalies in the pattern of ethnicity shown in the map, compared to the areas settled by major immigrant groups. The main drawback of the map is that it only shows the largest ethnicity in each county, which masks the distribution of the other groups.
Only a small % of the Hispanics in the southwest have known ancestry among people who lived there when it was part of Mexico. Those areas were very sparsely populated at the time. A large % are immigrants or the children of immigrants.
It’s the same basically with Asian Americans. At one time, so I read, an actual majority of the population of (what’s now the state of) Idaho was Chinese, railroad laborers. But few Chinese Americans now count any of those people among their ancestors: it was a small absolute number swamped by immigration since the 1960’s.
May I ask a related question? Are there many areas of the US outside say South Boston that are considered “Irish” in typical dominant character? I believe maybe Woodlawn(?), NY is considered so too but not heard of anywhere else beyond those two.
ETA: I mean still considered as such. I know there were plenty of places that were very Irish back in the day.
It’s a fascinating topic, but as to literal % I doubt it’s anywhere near that. For example, I have only one great grand parent who was an immigrant (she came from Ireland by way of England in 1867 as a 2 year old), all branches of the family Irish, all from the NY area (and almost all from Brooklyn) after around the 1850’s (some were Southerners before that). Some white groups intermarried very little until the recent past, especially in ethnic enclaves in cities. In the country at large it’s true that Protestants from the British Isles and Germans to a large degree (also other European groups to some degree) have all mixed together but I would guess the % of Americans with German-American ancestors is way lower than 95%, I’d bet well under half.
Germans came to the US continuously over a long period, in some periods more than others but not as skewed toward particular periods as say Italians or Russian Jews, or even the Irish (who’ve also come from the beginning to now, but with a huge explosion in the 1850’s and 60’s particularly after the potato famine mainly).
Obviously there’s a strong kind of ‘crystallization’ process where immigrants from the same place follow one another, on to Chicago rather than stay in NY, to farm in areas with climates like their homelands (Scandinavians in upper Midwest) rather than switch from agriculture to city labor, Somalia’s to Minnesota, Afghans to Fremont CA, you name it. Also that was influenced by prejudice especially in the past. One reason (Protestant at least) Germans and Scandinavians went to farm in the Midwest is that they were, to the existing inhabitants of those places, ‘regular people’ (not Catholics).
An Gadaí, here’s a list of the metropolitan areas in the U.S. with the highest proportion of those with Irish ancestry, and they are all in the northeastern U.S.:
Here’s a list of Irish neighborhoods in New York:
Here’s a list of Irish neighborhoods around the U.S.:
So there are communities that are thought of as being Irish. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they are nearly all Irish. It doesn’t even mean that they are majority Irish. It’s just that they have enough Irish-Americans in them and probably a history of an even larger proportion to have people think of them as Irish.
I am an ancestry buff as well and I do not have any German ancestry. I also don’t have any ancestors that arrived after the Revolutionary War. My last name comes from a direct line from my Jamestown ancestors (I visited their former plantation just last December and I was greeted with open arms by the park staff like some kind of living time capsule).
I do have significant Native American ancestry and probably some Jewish ancestry that came in fairly late but we are largely just ‘Americans’ as described. All European customs and family knowledge got obliterated a very long time ago. A lot of Southern families are the same way. I was amazed when I moved to the Northeast and many if not most families had at least some European artifacts that were handed down through just a few generations. My ancestors came over 10,000 - 300 years ago or so and that wasn’t really possible for us. The ancestral homeland is Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. The British isles that the ancestors left were contemporary with Shakespeare and many were before the Mayflower (I have no idea why people think they were among the first European settlers; they weren’t at all).
There is a reason why some people can’t describe themselves as anything other than ‘American’. Some high profile politicians have described the U.S. as a land of immigrants and stated that everyone is one or came from one. I guess that is true in an absolute sense just like it is true for every person that doesn’t live in the exact same area of Africa where humans originated but it is isn’t true in the recent spirit of the term. There really are Americans who have no foreign heritage more recent than several hundred years ago and even a few Native Americans that have none more than a few thousand.
That said, there are a whole lot of significant German populations across the U.S. Even places that you wouldn’t expect like Texas and Colorado have them. They spread out all over. There was once such a thing as a Texan-German language that developed in towns like Fredericksburg, TX that still celebrate their German heritage to this day in the form of festivals and traditional foods. There are lots of small and interesting pockets of unique heritage if you look hard enough.
I should add that I also agree that the large-scale maps as shown do not work well on a finer scale. In the area of Massachusetts that I work in, it is all Portuguese and a little Brazilian Portuguese thrown in for good measure because they also speak Portuguese. This is quite a large area that we are taking about. I love them just fine but I do have to insist that they speak English when they come into my office and sometimes that is a challenge when they get mad.
Some manage it better than others but I am constantly surrounded by people that fled the Azores and Portugal proper as well as Brazil because of economic conditions. I love them to death but they are as hot-headed as Italians by nature and the language is impossible to understand unless you are native (it is like a bastard child of Spanish as spoken by a Russian). They are generally honest and hard-working people though, I don’t see them represented on a map of the South Coast of Massachusetts even though they are a majority at work sometime going down 3 generations of employees at the same facility.
You’ll see (in the list labeled as “Other”) that Bristol County, Massachusetts and Bristol County, Rhode Island are identified as being plurality Portuguese. So, yes, it is very well known that there are substantial numbers of Portuguese-Americans in that area (at the point where the two Bristol Counties meet). And your characterization of Portuguese as “impossible to understand unless you are native (it is like a bastard child of Spanish as spoken by a Russian)” is just bizarre. It’s Portuguese. It’s the sixth most commonly spoken language in the world. All languages are impossible to understand unless you are native. You can make the same weird characterization of any language. (English - it’s like Frenchmen ruled over a group of West Germanic peoples who had invaded a Celtic area and were later invaded by a West Germanic people and who then later invaded several areas with speakers of various other peoples.)
