Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Is there data regarding the total number of immigrants in each year / each 10 year period, etc. throughout history (i.e. all who weren't born in the US)?
Although that's limited by the fact that a lot of migrants changed their names to fit in- "Muller" become "Miller", "Bielski" becomes "Biel", etc.- so it might not give a clear picture. It would also be difficult to count migrants from the British Isles, Scandinavia and Germany in that way, because they'd been coming to America since the 17th century, so there's no immediate telling if an O'Niel or a Schmidt arrived in 1880 or 1680.You could probably make a stab at it by looking at the census and checking the surnames, but that would be laborious.
a lot of migrants changed their names to fit in- "Muller" become "Miller", "Bielski" becomes "Biel", etc.
The reliability of figures also depends on where they're coming from. Numbers from the UK are relatively solid because we can count them at both ends, but that's not really possible in a lot of Southern and Eastern Europe. There's also the problem that a lot of migrants returned to Europe (something which is often overlooked), and may then have made return trips, so simply counting the raw number of entrants is going to give an artificially inflated figure.
Although that's limited by the fact that a lot of migrants changed their names to fit in- "Muller" become "Miller", "Bielski" becomes "Biel", etc.- so it might not give a clear picture. It would also be difficult to count migrants from the British Isles, Scandinavia and Germany in that way, because they'd been coming to America since the 17th century, so there's no immediate telling if an O'Niel or a Schmidt arrived in 1880 or 1680.
For some reason in the USA places with many Polish-Americans and with many German-Americans tend to be the same places.
One example - in the town of Bevent, Wisconsin, 61.0% of inhabitants report Polish ancestry and 30.6% report German ancestry.
In total 91.6% of the population of Bevent (100% = 1118 people) report either Polish or German ancestry. Quite intriguing.
In one thread (link below) Pangur Bán argued that most of Americans declare non-English ancestry (German, Irish, etc.), but most of them have English surnames - and he suggested that probably something is wrong here (either people with English ancestry declare non-English ancestry, or something else):
Most Germans and other East Europeans
Since when are Germans East Europeans?
There was also a spat of name-changing right around WW1--after the US entered the war, there were a lot of German immigrants who changed their names to fit in.
He said Group A and others from Group B.
especially considering you can just get data from the 2010 census.
Also, most people in the United States have mixed ancestry.
Finally, German is the largest ethnic group in the United States as far as white people go.
I haven't got clue about mine outside of English and Scottish.
The South, for example, contains 100+ million Americans and the majority respond as American.