Immigrant Families, European

History of European Migration in the United States

Early in the history of the United States, large numbers of Europeans immigrated to resettle in the New World. Much of this migration was prompted by a search for a better life and escape from persecution and famine. In fact, by today's definition, many of those early immigrants, such as the Pilgrims, who were escaping religious persecution, may be considered “refugees.”

In the 19th century, a greater diversity of Europeans were immigrating to the United States. While the contrast is frequently drawn between voluntary economic immigrants and refugees who are forced to flee, the distinction can be difficult to draw. Immigration is not a task that people embark on lightly, regardless of circumstances. In Europe, political violence or economic hardship often gave rise to [Page 570]different waves of migration. In the mid-19th century, the Irish were escaping the potato famine, and western Europeans the political unrest associated with the revolutions of 1848. Toward the end of the 19th century, the Germans were escaping the Franco-Prussian War, and the Italians poverty resulting from effects of industrialization, primarily in Southern Italy.

Whereas immigrants from the British Isles, western Europe, and Scandinavia predominated before the 1890s, by the 1900s people from Southern and Eastern Europe dominated the influx. Pogroms in the “Pale of Settlement” within the Russian Empire, which included today's Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, gave rise to a large exodus of Jews. Non-Jews were experiencing economic and political hardships in eastern Europe as well, particularly Poles whose country had been continually divided and ruled by Russia, Austria, and Prussia. In southern Europe, Italians continued to migrate and join distant relatives already resettled in the United States, and around the turn of the 20th century many Greek families sent their young men to work in the United States, eventually leading to the establishment of large Greek communities.

Immigration subsided with World War I and U.S. postwar isolationism, and was negligible between the World Wars. While the United States did take in European refugees displaced as a result of World War II, this migration was relatively small. The next large immigration wave in the United States is said to have occurred since the 1970s and continues to this day. In contrast to prior waves, the percentage of immigrant Europeans is quite small, dropping to 15% of all arrivals in the decade of 1991–2000, compared with 92% in the decade of 1901–1910 (see Table 1).

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