America is probably the greatest social experiment and demographic never undertaken by the human being. Since the United Kingdom conquered and colonized the east coast of North America, the migratory flow towards the interior of the future nation-state has been incessant. First from the United Kingdom itself, later from Europe, necessarily from Africa and finally from Latin America and Asia. A concoction of cultures and languages synthesized in a common identity, as vast as it is defective.
Understanding the United States today requires numerous migratory retrospective exercises. Despite the country’s Anglo-Saxon roots, the majority “ethnic group” is German, although filtered by customs and languages that are increasingly integrated into that arc of identity that we call “American.” Among the ruling class, Protestant and white, from the United States, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Irish and the occasional Pole slip in.
All of them traveled there driven by the difficult economic circumstances of Europe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Ireland, for example, suffered one of the worst modern famines due to a crisis in potato cultivation, which led to an exodus directed mainly towards Boston or New York. southern italy, impoverished around 1900, found an escape route to the same cities. The terrible political and economic position of the German or Swedish peasantry (despite the later economic development of both countries) did the same before the First World War.
During this type, the immigration policy of the United States was kind. Europe colonized the east coast but especially the first inland, what today comes to be called the “Middle West”, and where German or Nordic surnames abound.
The First World War changes everything, also in the United States. Immigration is less welcome and the flow stops. After the war, a more industrialized Europe enjoyed a brief period of prosperity, already depressurized by the demographic abundance of the previous decades. World War II and the boom economic growth of the European continent would forever stop an immigration that would forge from the base (for better or for worse) the American character.
And this is where today’s graph, published by VisualCapitalist, comes into play: the ascendancy of Latin America in immigration to the United States. After the war, Europe would go into the background in favor of other countries and continents. Mexico would then appear in the lead: if today the anti-immigration discourse of the US right is directed above all against the Latino population, it is because for more than half a century the migratory flow has been capitalized first by Mexico and then by other Central American countries .
Latin American culture and, therefore, Spanish, thus became another central element of the United States, to the point of now dominating a good part of the southern and western states of the country. In California more than 38% of the population is already of “Latino” descent, while in New Mexico either Texas the demographic pockets of Spanish-speaking or third-generation “immigrants” are gigantic. Latin American cuisine, customs, lifestyle, and immigration politics dominate much of the United States. It is an inseparable part of it.
It is a process that mimics that of European immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and to which other countries, such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras, gradually joined. In 2019, more than 50% of US immigration was still Latin American. Its dominance has only been offset in recent decades by Asian migrants: Chinese, Indian, Korean or Vietnamese have come to the United States more frequently, sometimes focused on highly technical sectors such as technology.
Africa has also made some progress, albeit timidly, not representing more than 6% of the total. The history of the second half of the 20th century in the United States is the history of its relationship with Latin America, especially in terms of migration.
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