Immigration to the United States is the historic process whereby people have mass-migrated to the region corresponding with the continental United States since the European rediscovery of the Americas in the late fifteenth century. There was significat immigration during the colonial period when England/Britain settled the Thirteen Colonies along the East Coast. This involved large numbers of English colonists, along with smaller amounts of Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German and Dutch settlers. However, the larger waves of migration came following the establishment of the United States. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these migrants were overwhelmingly coming from Europe. This shifted from the 1920s onwards as the main sources of immigration to the United States became Latin American countries and Asian countries. Immigration to the United States constitutes one of the biggest migrations and demographic shifts in human history.[1]
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Immigration to the United States chronology of events
North America was actually first discovered during the European Age of Exploration by an Italian navigator sailing under an English flag. This was John Cabot and the year was 1497.[2] Like most European powers other than Portugal and Spain, the English did not manage to mount an effective strategy of overseas colonization until the seventeenth century. Therefore it was 1607 before the first permanent English settlements in what is now the United States were established. Yet when they were, they were soon part of a flourishing string of colonies running from New England south to the Carolinas. The Dutch were also involved here and settled New Holland and New Amsterdam (later renamed New York once the English took it over in the second half of the seventeenth century) in the middle of the English colonies.[3]
English colonization would be the key factor in English immigration to the lands that would soon become the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were not entirely alone though. As noted, waves of Dutch settlers settled in what is now New York and their ancestors can still often be identified there through their Dutch surnames. Large numbers of Irish and Scottish settlers also arrived, with the Scots-Irish being a major component of European immigration to regions like Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware in the eighteenth century, both before and after US independence. Finally, a contingent of Germans, Swiss and other peoples from Central Europe began arriving to Pennsylvania from the 1680s onwards.[4]
There was a more nefarious element to this. The first ship carrying slaves from western Africa arrived to Virginia in 1619 as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It was the first of many. Between 1619 and the middle of the nineteenth century when the trade of new slaves into the United States was curbed, it is estimated that around 388,000 Africans were brought to the colonies or the US after independence. This is a very small proportion of the approximately 12 million slaves trafficked across the Atlantic by Europeans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet over time it has had an enormous bearing on the country’s demography.[5]
As significant as these early waves of immigration were, they would soon be eclipsed by the developments of the nineteenth century. As vaccines and other life-saving measures were introduced into European society, population levels there expanded enormously from the 1790s onwards. The Americas acted as the pressure release. Millions and then tens of millions left for the western hemisphere, especially so in the century between the 1820s and the 1920s. Chief amongst these diasporas were those of the Italians and the Irish. Millions of people from these impoverished countries made the United States their new home in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[6]
They were joined by Jewish migrants fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire, German and Polish people looking to leave Austria and Prussia (later the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires) and smaller waves of migrants from countries like Norway and Sweden who are often overlooked in accounts of immigration to the United States. Often these different migrant groups shaped the settlement of distinct parts of the US. Irish and Italian communities, for instance, became staples of cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. The Poles settled extensively in some of the great cities that were emerging in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century like Cleveland and Cincinnati.[7] Lots of people from Scandinavia and northern Germany sought out lands and opportunities in the Great Plains beyond the Great Lakes and their ancestors are still found in large numbers today in places like the Dakotas, Nebraska and Wyoming.[8]
Eventually population growth stabilized in Europe, a development compounded by the mortality rates seen during the First World War and Second World War, leading to a major decline in European immigrants to the US. It was soon replaced by immigration from other parts of the world. Places like Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California had once formed some of the northern extremities of Spain’s vast colonial empire in the Americas. Although thinly settled by the Spanish by comparison with places like Mexico, Peru and Cuba, enough of a kernel of Spanish settlement existed here by the nineteenth century that a steady stream of Latin people continued to migrate to the Sunbelt states of America. They came in ever larger numbers from the early twentieth century onwards, often driven by disruptions in their own countries such as the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s.[9]
Finally, in the second half of the twentieth century, as our world became ever more connected through trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific aviation and other means, the number of people arriving from Asia, Africa and other parts of the world continued to increase. Immigration has shaped the United States and made it what it is today. In this respect there are few other countries like it in the world or historically, a country which is a melting pot of ethnic groups, races, cultures and creeds.
Extent of Immigration to the United States
The scale of the migration involved has increased exponentially over time. Back in the first half of the seventeenth century when the English and Dutch began settling their first colonies on the North American seaboard, there were often as little as a few hundred and no more than several thousand settlers arriving to places like Boston, New Amsterdam and Jamestown every year. By the end of the seventeenth century this figure was exceeding 10,000 some years as the English colonies became magnets for those seeking religious freedom or economic opportunity from places like Ireland, Scotland, Germany and, of course, England.[10]
As significant as these early waves of immigration were, they were dwarfed by what came after the establishment of the United States. Consider that when the first US census was held in 1790 the total population was recorded as being just under four million people. That had doubled by around 1812, an expansion in just over two decades that was largely accounted for by immigration. It was really from the 1840s onwards, though, with the advent of the steamships that things truly exploded. There were 17 million people in the US in 1840. There were 40 million in 1870, 50 million a decade later and by 1900 76 million people called the United States their home. By 1950 this had reached 150 million and nearly twice that number, some 280 million, ushered in the twenty-first century in the year 2000.[11]
Demographic impact of immigration to the United States
The demographic impact of all of this immigration has been incalculable. Unfortunately, owing to in the introduction of European diseases from the 1490s onwards, brutal colonial and US policies such as the Trail of Tears which ethnically cleansed large parts of the country, there are only an estimated four and a half full Native American people in the United States today, although the figure is disputed, with more and more people claiming some form of Native American ancestry in the early twenty-first century. That is out of a population of in excess of 330 million, less than 1.5%. Therefore, over 98.5% of the population of the United States exists there as a result of immigration to the United States and the English/British colonies that preceded it. Almost anyone looking to trace their ancestry in the United States today will be doing so by examining the history of immigration to the United States in one form or another.[12]
See also
Explore more about immigration to the United States
- 1850 United States Federal Census record collection on MyHeritage
- 1900 United States Federal Census record collection on MyHeritage
- 1950 United States Federal Census record collection on MyHeritage
- Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 record collection on MyHeritage
- Angel Island’s Immigrants from 80 Countries: Stories from the West Coast Counterpart to Ellis Island at Legacy Family Tree Webinar
- Bridging the Gap: Finding Ancestors in the United States between 1780 and 1840 at Legacy Family Tree Webinar
- The Scots-Irish in America at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Learning More about American Female Ancestors Prior to 1850 at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- The “Forgotten” Immigrants: The Swiss to America at Legacy at Family Tree Webinars
- Documenting Jewish Families in America: The Early Years 1654-1880 at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Welsh Emigration to North America at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- History as Told Through Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists at the MyHeritage Blog
References
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/immigration-united-states-timeline
- ↑ https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/john-cabot
- ↑ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191736896.timeline.0001
- ↑ https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-history/1681-1776.html
- ↑ https://news.emory.edu/features/2019/06/slave-voyages/index.html
- ↑ http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/economic-migration/irial-glynn-emigration-across-the-atlantic-irish-italians-and-swedes-compared-1800-1950
- ↑ https://case.edu/ech/articles/p/poles
- ↑ http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ea.036
- ↑ https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mexican-americans
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/thirteen-colonies
- ↑ https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2002/demo/POP-twps0056.html
- ↑ https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/19/us/census-native-americans-rise-population/index.html