European immigrants

SIGNIFICANCE: Although the territory of the United States was originally settled in ancient times by the Asian ancestors of modern American Indians, European immigrants of the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries dominated the landscape and brought with them the culture and institutions to which other modern immigrants had to adapt.

European immigration to the "New World" of the Western Hemisphere had its origins in the Age of Exploration that began with Spanish and Portuguese voyages of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The creation of European colonies in the Americasas expressions of political power and as business opportunitiesstimulated both forced and free migration from Europe. European immigration has been almost constant since the early seventeenth century, but it has waxed and waned with changing economic, social, demographic, and political conditions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Historical Origins of Transatlantic Migration

Transatlantic migration can be seen as an extension of long-standing patterns of movement within Europe that stretched back to the Middle Ages. Due to push-pull factors such as better technology, improved farming practices, and a warming of the climate, medieval populations expanded and put pressure on existing arable land. Encouraged by rulers, nobles, and kingswho would often remit certain feudal dutiespeasant populations migrated to virgin lands. This occurred within the core regions of western Europe, but there were also significant movements of population from Germany and Flanders into less populated areas of central and eastern Europe. Due to persecutions that stemmed from the onset of the bubonic plague during the mid-fourteenth century, Jewish populations migrated to Poland and Lithuaniawhere they received improved treatment and a measure of religious freedom.

As urban areas across the continent grew during the early modern period, they increasingly drew populations from the countryside. During the early modern period, populations displaced by war or religious persecution also migrated throughout Europe. These included French Huguenotswho moved to Englandand Irish and Scottish Roman Catholicswho left the British Isles for continental Europe.

Migration within Europe was a necessary precursor to transatlantic migration. Studies of immigrants from the colonial period onward indicated a majority of individual European immigrants had some previous migration experiencesuch as within Europeprior to coming to North America. In a study of the British colonies in North America after the Seven Years’ Waralso known as the French and Indian War from 1756–1763Bernard Bailyn found one-third of all immigrants to North America came from London or its surrounding counties. Of these immigrants, many were relatively recent arrivals in the British capital city. Two-thirds of these immigrants were Scots, many of whom came as a result of political and economic disruptions in the Scottish Highland regions.

Internal migrations within Europe increased the likelihood of individuals making longer and more permanent journeys for several reasons. First, it gave them access to new economic opportunities and altered their economic worldviews. Most local peasant and subsistence economies in Europe prior to migration were perceived as zero-sum games in which those who attained greater material wealth did so only at the expense of their neighbors. Migration changed this view and opened up the possibility of expanding one’s material universe and realizing economic possibilities that were previously unattainable.

Market Economies and Industrialization

The process of European immigration to the New World was closely tied to economic and social changes in Europe well underway by the eighteenth century. In England, the process of enclosure took land away from peasant-tenant farmers. Spurred by the growth of the profitable wool trade, this was often to create pasture land for raising sheep. Although this movement began during the late medieval period, it accelerated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dispossessed peasants were sometimes compensated with less desirable pieces of land, but many migrated to cities or to rural areas to work as wage laborers. A common saying during this time claimed England was a land where sheep eat men. In Ireland, Scotland, and parts of Germany, efforts to modernize farming had a similar effect that, coupled with wars and political upheaval, resulted in the growth of a class of landless or land-poor people in need of wage labor.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the growth of European industrialization drew many out of the countryside and into factories, mills, and mines. This process affected western Europe most directly, but its indirect effects were felt throughout the continent. By the nineteenth century, industrialization was evident throughout central Europe and even in Russia and the Balkans by the end of the century. This movement drew large numbers of peasants out of rural villages and into cities, but the new industrial jobs provided by this economic change could not keep pace with the expanding size of the rural population or with the number being displaced from the land. Rural populations continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century because of the cessation of major wars, the introduction of new crops such as the potato, and improved health and sanitary conditions. This put additional land pressure on the rural populations, something exacerbated in some areas by inheritance patterns in which land was divided evenly among peasants’ heirs.

In central and eastern Europe, the movement of peasants was kept in check throughout the seventeenth century by quasi-feudal laws that bound the peasants to the land. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, these laws were gradually done away with in an effort to modernize agricultural practicespeasants were emancipated in Prussia in 1807, Austria-Hungary in 1848, Russia in 1863, Romania in 1864, and the Balkans after 1878 as Ottoman control receded.

The usual method of peasant emancipation was to convert labor duties into cash rents and—much like the earlier enclosure movement in England—to restrict peasant access to pastures, woodlands, or other resources once used in common. As one Polish scholar described, "peasant emancipation took the shackles off the peasants’ feet—and took the shoes as well." The result was a sudden need for money in village economies where cash had rarely been used. This impelled peasants to migrate in search of work, and as they did so they found not only the ability to pay rents but the possibility of bettering their economic status.

Those living close to industrial areas in Europe were usually attracted to those regions. Peasants living in more remote areas, however, were more likely to travel overseasespecially to the United States. This was the result of a clear-sighted economic strategy and improving transportation technologyespecially railroads and steamships. Over time the speed of travel grew and its costs shrank—not only in the price of tickets but also in the time and other expenses saved. This made the New World more attractive as a destination. Given the higher wages offered in America, the benefits of peasants traveling to America grew accordingly.

Attraction of the New World

North America’s abundance of resources and its relatively smaller and less densely populated areas began attracting immigrants during the early seventeenth century. By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the average American had more personal freedom and a better standard of living than counterparts in Europeeven in the better-off countries of western Europe. Throughout its history, average wages in the United States have consistently been higher than in Europe. Moreover, due to Indian removal policies and westward expansion during the nineteenth century, the United States offered an abundance of farm and grazing land that was both relatively inexpensive and highly productive.

America attracted three main types of immigrants, a pattern that continued essentially unchanged into the twenty-first century. The first were "settler immigrants"who come with the intention of settling permanently in the New World. They usually brought all or most of their immediate and extended family members and thus cut their strongest ties to their home villages. Historically this pattern was often associated with those who came to America with the specific intention of taking up farms. Bringing additional family members was beneficial as an additional source of farm labor. The majority of settler immigrants from Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were from northern and western Europe.

Labor seekers are the second type of immigrants—those who come to find jobs with good wages. Labor-seeking immigrants continued to make up the largest number of immigrants to the United States. Typical labor-seeking immigrants were men aged between sixteen and forty-five who come for unskilled or semiskilled work. A significant number of women also came as labor-seeking immigrants. However, in most European immigrant streamswith the notable exception of Irelandmen historically predominated or were perceived and recorded as doing so. Labor-seeking immigrants may come for limited periods of time and then return to their home country. In the case of European immigrants, this resulted in very high return rates from some countries. Among southern Italian immigrants, return rates as high as 40 percent were not uncommon. The largest groups of labor-seeking immigrants from Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were from eastern and southern Europe.

Refugeesthose fleeing some form of religious or political persecution constituted the third type of immigrants. These immigrants—despite their prominence in the public consciousness—represented by far the least common form of immigration. Political or religious immigrants ranged from seventeenth century dissenters, to victims of Nazi or Soviet terror during the 1940s and 1950s, to people from the Middle East or other war-torn regions in the 1990s and twenty-first century.

Colonial Immigration

The first significant European immigration to the New World came from the British Isles with the first communities formed in New England during the 1620s. A smaller number of English also settled in Virginia and the Chesapeake region. Throughout the seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, immigrants arrived in a slow trickle from the British Isles along with some Germans and Swiss in Pennsylvania, Dutch and Flemish in New York, and about six hundred Swedes and Finns in Delaware and Pennsylvania. A scattering of Sephardic Jews, French Protestants, and Poles could also be found. The majority of English settler immigrants came to New England as members of religious dissenter groups. In Virginia and the Chesapeake region, a significant number of indentured servants from throughout the British Isles were transported to serve as labor on tobacco plantations.

Between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, immigration to the British colonies grew dramaticallyrising to approximately 15,000 per year. Germans and Swiss made up the largest single group, numbering about 125,000, followed by Protestant Irish at 55,000, Scots at 40,000, and English at 30,000 people. In addition to the transportation of about 85,000 enslaved Africans, the new immigration greatly increased the population of the middle and southern colonies in the years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

During the Revolutionary War and in the decades of economic readjustment and wars in Europe following American Independence, immigration decreased dramaticallyespecially from its traditional sources in the British Islesthough some German immigrants continued to arrive. During the conflict, a significant number of Europeans with military experience arrived to provide critical assistance to the American colonists, with French, Germans, Poles, and Hungarians the most prominently represented.

Immigration Between 1820–1880

Immigration began to increase once again during the 1820s in response to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the western expansion of the United States, and the growth of the American economy. In 1820, 8,385 European immigrants arrived in the United States. Ten years later, arrivals reached 23,322. During the 1840s and 1850s, immigration numbers skyrocketed, reaching a peak of 427,833 in 1855 alone. Thereafter, poor economic conditions and the onset of the US Civil War in 1861 again reduced European immigration dramaticallyowever, it never fell below 100,000 immigrants per year. Immigration grew once more, peaking in 1866 and again in 1873, when arrivals again topped 400,000 per year.

Among immigrants arriving before the Civil War, three groups predominatedIrish, Germans, and English. Irish immigrants were the most numerous during the 1840s and early 1850s. The Great Irish Faminerepressive English land policies in Ireland, and generally backward economic conditions pushed many Irish to the New Worldwhere they found work as laborers. From the mid-1850s, German immigration dominated arrivals. A high proportion of Germans came as settler immigrants and took up homes and farms in the Midwest and Great Lakes states as well as in cities such as St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. Prior to the Civil War, there was also a steadily growing influx of Scandinavians and the first significant immigration of Czechs and Poles.

Following the Civil War, Germans and Irish continued to arrive in large numbers, but new nationalities also began to appear on American shoresNorwegians, Swedes, Danes, Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles. Immigration after the war represented the last great wave of settler immigrants who arrived to look for farms in the Midwest and Great Plains. Thereafter, good land became increasingly difficult to acquire, though agricultural colonization continued in the arid lands of the west and cut-over regions of the Great Lakes.

Immigration Between 1880–1924

Beginning in the 1880s and continuing through the passage of restrictive immigration laws in 1924, the largest wave of immigration in history arrived on North America’s shores. The largest number of arrivals came in the period from 1900 to 1914rrivals fell off sharply during World War I. The largest number of immigrants came in 1907, when approximately 1.3 million arrived during that year alone.

Although immigrants continued to arrive from western Europe and Scandinavia, this wave of immigration was dominated by east-central and southern Europeans. Beginning in the eastern marches of the German Empire, "immigration fever" spread eastward into Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the western regions of Russia. Italy also sent massive numbers of immigrants, and while many came from northern Italy, southern Italians and Sicilians dominated Italian arrivals. From east-central Europe, Poles were the largest single group, arriving from the German, Russian, and Austrian empires. Jews were a close second—although many came from Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Romania, Russian Jews formed the largest contingent. A host of smaller groups also came—Hungarians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Carpatho-Rusins, Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians, Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, and Greeks.

In contrast to earlier waves of immigrants, the Europeans who came between 1880 and 1924 were predominantly labor-seeking immigrants. However, some did come within family units and some settled on farms. It was primarily industrial work that drew this wave of immigrants to the United States, and they settled in the areas of heaviest industrial activity—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Midwest and Great Lakes states.

Wage labor immigrants from east-central and southern Europe provided the workforce for America’s industry, and by the turn of the century dominated both heavy and light industries in most sectors. Jews and Italians were prominent in the needle trades. Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Hungarians dominated coal mining and steel making. Poles were the largest group in auto manufacturing, and Poles and Lithuanians predominated in meatpacking. Finns and southern Slavs were the largest groups in copper and other hard-rock mining. The prominence of these groups made them a significant force in the industrial labor movement of the 1930s. The success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) depended on the support of immigrant workers and their second-generation children.

Post-World War II Immigrants

Between World War II and the reform of US immigration laws in 1965, the United States admitted between two and three million European immigrants. Many were political refugees, with Jewish Holocaust survivors the most prominent among them. There were also significant numbers of Poles—victims of Nazi and Soviet genocide and persecution as well as former members of the Polish armed forces in exile who were unable to return home due to Communist oppression. Refugees from the Soviet Union who were in Germany were also granted entry—with Balts and Ukrainians the most numerous. Another often overlooked immigration that resulted from the war was the arrival of war brides of US servicemen. An estimated 100,000 of these women arrived during and after the war. Hungarian freedom fighters were another refugee group from Europe that arrived after the failed Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule.

Immigration Since 1965

Following the major reform of US immigration laws in 1965especially the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965a steady flow of immigration from Europe developed. Family reunifications, the need for work, political oppression, and the collapse of Communism during the 1980s and 1990s were some of the major factors in this continuing stream. Some traditional sending countries continued to provide large numbers of immigrants. Irish immigrants arrived in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s until the dramatic improvement in Ireland’s economic situation during the 1990s. Dissidents from the Soviet Union and its so-called satellite nations figured prominently in arrivals prior to 1989Jewish refuseniks from the Soviet Union and Polish Solidarity activists were the best known.

Following the fall of Eastern Europe’s Communist governments during the last decade of the twentieth century and the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, a large number of Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles, as well as Romanians and Bosnians arrived in the United States. These new immigrants were likely to be better educated than earlier eastern European immigrants. They followed employment trends and could be found throughout the United States where skilled workers were needed. Older patterns of settlement, however, continued to be important. For example, Russian Jews settled in New York City in the largest numbers, and by 2000 Poles had once again become the largest immigrant group in Chicago.

European immigration has continued into the first decades of the twenty-first century, when Europeans were still making up between ten and twenty percent of the immigrants admitted to the United States on an annual basis. This pattern, where immigrants from Latin America and Asia far outpaced those from Europe, appeared likely to continue into the foreseeable future. In 2014, the Migration Policy Institute reported 4.8 million European immigrants resided in the United Statesaccounting for about 11 percent of the 42.4 million total foreign-born population. In 2024, these total numbers were roughly the same, althoughas a percentageEuropean-born immigrants had slightly reduced. Twenty-first century European immigrants were mainly drawn to US urban centers, and almost 40 percent were recorded by the US Census Bureau as living in the states of New York, California, and Illinois in surveys compiled from 2009 to 2013.

The Russian invasion of Ukrainewhich began on February 24, 2022brought about the displacement of millions of Ukrainians. Under the Biden administration, in 2022, the United States approved the entry of 180,000 Ukrainian nationals. The United States also extended Temporary Protected Status to many Ukrainians already within its borders. Thousands more have sought entry into the United States through its southern boundary. In the weeks shortly after the Russian invasion, US Customs and Border Protection reported having encountered nearly 10,000 undocumented Ukrainiansprimarily at ports of entry along the Mexican border. This number was thought to hae grown to 25,000 by April 2022. In March 2023, the United States Department of Homeland Security announced that it would begin considering one-year extensions for these persons. In addition to Ukrainians, the war also prompted smaller numbers of Russians to seek residence in the United States after they sought refuge from participating in the conflict.

These arrivals to the US southern border differed from previous European immigration patterns in that attempted entry in manners typically associated with immigrants from Latin American countries. European immigrants tended to be older than those from Latin America and with higher levels of education. They were also more prone to have proficiency with English-language skills. In other respects, European immigrants more closely resembled Chinese immigrants at the southern border who were likewise seeking entry. Chinese immigrants also tended to be older and with higher educational levels. The introduction of immigrants from Ukraine and Russia arrested what had been a downward trend in European immigration to the US. European immigration had lagged since the conclusion of the conflict in former Yugoslavia. Also in that timeframe, the majority of European immigrants had come from the Eastern countries of the continent. Many new arrivals came from former republics of the Soviet Unionwhich now had somewhat contentious relationships with Russia. 

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