Immigration and Migratory Patterns
Contents:
1. Regions of Italy.
2. Italian Americans in the USA.
3. Early Days; Italians Explorers.
4. Italians in the USA.
5. Jews and Italians.
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Italy may be divided up into regions.
In the South we have the island of Siciy and the south including Apulia and the city of Naples.
In the center there is Rome bordered by Florence and Bologna to its north.
In the northwest is Genoa. and to its north Milano.
To the northeast is Venice.
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2. Italian Americans in the USA.
Italian Americans form the fifth-largest ethnic group, with over 16 million people claiming Italian ancestry. Most arrived during the Great Arrival between 1880 and 1924, fleeing rural poverty in southern Italy and Sicily to build new lives in the United States.
AI tells us:
Early Arrivals (Pre-1880): Small numbers of northern Italians, including artists, stonemasons, and political refugees.
The Mass Migration (1880-1924): More than 4 million southern Italians arrived, entering through hubs like Ellis Island to work in industrial cities.
Post-WWII (Mid-20th Century): A smaller final wave of immigration following the devastation of World War II.
Settlement and Culture
Urban Hubs: Settled heavily in northeastern and midwestern industrial centers like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, forming distinct neighborhoods known as Little Italys.
Challenges: Faced severe discrimination, harsh tenement living conditions, and pressure to assimilate.
Legacy: Deeply shaped American food, religion (predominantly Roman Catholicism), community life, and labor history.
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3. Early Days; Italians Explorers. Amercia = "Ha-Macjhiri"
Italian expolorers were important in opening up the American Continents to European settlers.
Christopher Colombus (1451-1506) from Genoa (but venice is also possible) may have been of Jewish descent. His name means "The Dove." He was knowledgeable in geography, astronomy, and history.
Columbus had persuaded the joint Monarchs of Spain, Queen Isabella-1 and King Ferdinand-2 to sponsor a journey to the west. First Columbus came to the Bahamas, and later he established a colony in Haiti.
John Cabot possibilbly from Genoa and his son Sebastian explored the eastern seaboard of North America for Henry-7 of England from 1497 into the early 1500s.
. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano from Florenze was the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between Florida and New Brunswick (Canada).
Amerigo Vespucci from Florence first demonstrated c. 1501 that the New World was not Asia, as initially conjectured, but a different continent.
America is named after him. Martin Waldseemuller (c. 1470 -1520, southwest Germany) in 1507 applied the Latinized form "America" to a map showing the New World.
The name Amerigo may be a derivation from the Hebrew "Ha-Machiri" meang "Pertaining to Machir." Machir was the son of Manasseh son of Joseph.
A small wave of Protestants, known as Waldensians, from Northern Italy immigrated in the 1600s, with the majority coming between 1654 and 1663. They spread out across what was then called New Netherland and what would become New York, New Jersey, and the Lower Delaware River regions.
The first Italian to be registered as residing in the area corresponding to the current U.S. was Pietro Cesare Alberti, commonly regarded as the first Italian American, a Venetian seaman who, in 1635, settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, what would eventually become New York City.
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4. Italians in the USA.
About 80 million people around the world claim full or partial Italian ancestry.
In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded slightly more than 16.5 million Americans reporting full or partial Italian ancestry, about 5.1% of the U.S. population.
Most Italians in the USA today are from the south though many northerners are also present.
On the whiole emigrants from northern Italy tended to prefer other areas of Europe (such as Switzerland and Germany) and parts of Latin America such as Argentina.
From the late 1800s until the 1930s, the United States was a main destination for Italian immigrants, with most first settling in the New York metropolitan area, but with other major Italian American communities developing in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, San Francisco, Providence, and New Orleans. Most Italian immigrants to the United States came from the Southern regions of Italy, namely Campania, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily.
In the second phase of emigration (1900 to World War I), slightly less than half of emigrants were from the south and most of them were from rural areas,
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5. Jews and Italians.
Urban Neighborhoods: Arriving in large numbers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish and Italian immigrants often lived side-by-side in crowded urban enclaves like New York City's Lower East Side or Brooklyn, leading to shared working-class experiences and inter-communal relationships.
Fiorello Henry La Guardia (born Fiorello Raffaele Enrico La Guardia; 1882 - 1947) served as the 100th mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1946.. La Guardia had a Jewish mother. La Guardia governed in an uneasy alliance with New York's Jews and liberal WASPs, together with ethnic Italians and Germans.
A panel of 69 scholars in 1993 ranked LaGuardia as the best big city mayor in American history.
