US Immigration by State 1880–1920

The four decades straddling the beginning of the 20th century saw the US population more than double, from 50 million to 106 million, fuelled both by high rates of natural increase and massive immigration. The magnets for these new arrivals were quite focused: the job opportunities in the industrial cities of the Northeast, and the chance of owning farming land in the wide-open spaces of the West. By contrast, the old South, with its large ex-slave population, had little need of additional cheap labour and was largely avoided. Some of the largest inflows (as a proportion of population) occurred in the Northern Midwest as French Canadians fled discriminatory land ownership laws in the “Quebec Diaspora”: in 1900 the state with the single highest proportion of foreign-born residents (35 percent) in the Continental US was North Dakota, while Alabama and Mississippi each had less than 1 percent foreign-born. Labour intensive agriculture and construction projects attracted immigration from the Far East to California, but the largest absolute numbers of incomers were to urban New England from Italy, Ireland and the war-ravaged empires of Central and Eastern Europe – Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia.