Some 65 million people left Europe between 1815 and 1933 alone, most of them for the Americas, on top of roughly 1.5 million Europeans who had settled in the New World between 1500 and 1800. From the 1820s to the early 1930s the United States took about 32.5 million European immigrants, Argentina 6.5 million, Canada 5 million and Brazil 4.5 million. The movement ran in waves: Spanish and Portuguese colonists from 1492, indentured British servants in the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish famine emigrants in the 1840s, then Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Poles and Eastern European Jews passing through New York’s Ellis Island and the Hotel de Inmigrantes in Buenos Aires. It reshaped the population of two continents, and it went hand in hand with the collapse of Indigenous populations and with the forced transport of millions of enslaved Africans.
Spaniards and Portuguese to New Spain, Peru and Minas Gerais, 1492–1822
The first European migration was small in number and large in effect. About 200,000 Spaniards settled in Spain’s American provinces before 1600, a flow of officials, clergy, minor nobles and working families averaging roughly 3,000 people a year. Around 437,000 left Spain between 1500 and 1650, mostly for New Spain (Mexico), Peru and the Caribbean islands, and over 1.86 million Spaniards are estimated to have crossed between 1492 and 1824, a million of them in the 18th century, when the Bourbon kings encouraged emigration.
Portugal sent about 100,000 settlers to Brazil between 1500 and 1700. Then gold was found in Minas Gerais, and emigration rose about fivefold: around 600,000 Portuguese settled in Brazil in the 18th century, out of a home population of about two million in 1700. Vila Rica, now Ouro Preto, became for a time one of the most populous towns in the Americas. Yet Europeans were never the largest group of newcomers to Brazil: some 4 million enslaved Africans were brought there between 1550 and 1850.
For the people already living in the Americas, these arrivals were catastrophic. Estimates of the pre-1492 Indigenous population range from 8 million to 112 million; the geographer William Denevan’s widely cited figure is about 54 million. Even the lowest estimates give a fall of about 80% in Mexico, Central and South America by the end of the 17th century, from Eurasian epidemics alongside war, forced labour and removal; in New Spain the cocoliztli epidemics of the 16th century alone killed 5–15 million people. Historians still debate how much weight to give each cause, and some classify the destruction as genocide. Brazil alone is thought to have had about 2.4 million Indigenous inhabitants when the Portuguese arrived in 1500.
Indentured Servants and Free Settlers in British North America, 1630s–1820
North of the Spanish empire, migration was driven by labour contracts. Between one half and two thirds of the Europeans who reached the Thirteen Colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution came under indentures: they had their passage paid in exchange for, typically, several years of work, with contracts for adults over 24 lasting about three years. Most were young; about 75% were under 25. Indentured servants were concentrated from Virginia north to New Jersey.
In total about 500,000–550,000 Europeans reached the Thirteen Colonies before 1775. Some 55,000 of them were convicts transported against their will; of the roughly 450,000 who came voluntarily, the historian Tomlins estimates that 48% were indentured. Of 322,000 arrivals from Britain, between 190,000 and 250,000 were Scots and Irish. Other streams fed in: Germans founded Germantown, outside Philadelphia, in 1683, and Pennsylvania still has 3.5 million people of German ancestry; Swedes and Finns settled New Sweden on the Delaware River from 1638 until the Dutch took it in 1655; and colonists from northern France laid the foundations of French Canada. From 1760 to 1820, as indenture faded, 871,000 Europeans emigrated to the Americas, more than 70% of them British and Irish free settlers.
Famine Ships from Ireland to Grosse Île and the St. Lawrence, 1845–1855
The single sharpest exodus came from Ireland. Potato blight struck in 1845, and the Great Famine lasted until 1852, worst of all in “Black ’47”. Of a population of about 8.5 million, roughly one million died and more than a million emigrated during the famine itself; between 1845 and 1855 at least 2.1 million people left the island. Ireland’s population fell by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871, and some towns lost two-thirds of their people.
Many sailed for British North America, and a large number arrived sick. Grosse Île, an island in the St. Lawrence River downstream from Quebec City, had been set up as a quarantine station in 1832 during a cholera epidemic and reopened for Irish emigrants with typhus. More than 3,000 Irish people are believed to have died on the island, and over 5,000 are buried in its cemetery. Over the following decades the Irish in North America grew into one of its largest ancestry groups: 38.6 million Americans reported Irish ancestry in the 2020 census, and 4.6 million Canadians in 2016.
Germans, Swedes, Italians and Eastern Europeans Through Ellis Island, 1840–1924
Steamships, cheap land on the American frontier and industrial jobs in its cities turned migration into a mass movement. Germans came first in numbers: nearly six million arrived in the United States between 1820 and the First World War, and from 1840 to 1890 they were the largest immigrant group. Political refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, the “Forty-Eighters”, came with them. Most Germans headed for the Midwest and the river cities; by 1900 Cleveland, Milwaukee and Cincinnati were each more than 40% German American, and in 1910 Omaha was 57%. About 1.3 million Swedes followed between the 1840s and the 1920s, pushed by crop failures and population growth; the 1890 census counted nearly 800,000 Swedish Americans.
From the 1880s the main sources shifted south and east. Between 1861 and 1985 about 29 million Italians emigrated, 16 million of them before 1914, mainly poor farmers from the south seeking “bread and work”; about 10 million later returned. Between 1880 and 1914 about two million Yiddish-speaking Jews arrived from Eastern Europe, chiefly from the Russian Empire and its Pale of Settlement, and over the late 19th and early 20th centuries more than two million Poles came from the Prussian, Austrian and Russian partitions; the oldest Polish settlement in the United States, Panna Maria in Texas, had been founded by Upper Silesians from Prussia in 1854. Before 1890, 82% of immigrants to the United States had come from northern and western Europe; from 1891 to 1920 that share fell to 25%, while eastern, central and southern Europe supplied 64%.
Most landed at New York. Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954; new arrivals faced medical and legal inspection and could be detained or deported. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 then closed the door. The 1924 law capped annual immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere at 165,000, about 80% below the pre-1914 average, and set quotas of 2% of each nationality as counted in the 1890 census, deliberately favouring northern and western Europe. Our page on the countries with the most immigrants shows how far the United States still leads today.
Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Halifax: The Other Gateways
About 11 million Europeans went to Latin America between 1815 and 1918, 38% of them Italians, 28% Spaniards and 11% Portuguese. Smaller streams reached Mexico (about 326,000), Colombia (126,000) and Peru (30,000), but the bulk went to Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Uruguay and Chile. Argentina recruited them on purpose. Its 1853 constitution, shaped by the political theorist Juan Bautista Alberdi, told the state to promote European immigration, and Alberdi’s maxim “to govern is to populate” became policy. Immigrants were steered towards the Pampas and Patagonia, lands the Argentine army had taken from the Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples in the Conquest of the Desert in the last quarter of the 19th century.
In Buenos Aires new arrivals first slept in the Rotonda de Retiro, which held 800 people and was used from 1877 to 1911. Its replacement, the Hotel de Inmigrantes, was built at Puerto Madero between 1905 and 1911 after cholera epidemics, with white-tiled corridors designed to be easy to disinfect and a railway station close by for the onward journey. More than a million immigrants passed through it in its 42 years of operation; it now houses the National Museum of Immigration.
Brazil drew its migrants to the coffee estates of São Paulo. From its first census in 1872 to 2000 it received about 6 million immigrants, four-fifths of them from Latin Europe: about 1.8 million Portuguese, 1.7 million Italians and 760,000 Spaniards. Between 1877 and 1903 an average of about 71,000 arrived each year, 58% of them Italian. Conditions on the plantations were harsh enough that Prussia banned emigration to Brazil in 1859 after complaints that German settlers were being exploited. Even so, the foreign-born share of Brazil’s population peaked at only about 7%, or 2 million people, in 1920.
Canada was European-settled from the start: at its first census in 1871, 98.5% of respondents gave a European origin. Its great year for arrivals was 1913, the peak year of immigration. From 1928 to 1971 nearly a million newcomers entered through Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, now the Canadian Museum of Immigration and often compared with Ellis Island. The legacy shows in census counts: in 2016, 19.7 million Canadians reported a European ethnic origin, and in the 2020 US census German and Italian ancestries were claimed by 45 million and 16.8 million Americans. How this kind of long-distance, mostly voluntary movement differs from forced and internal migration is set out in our guide to the types of migration.