The settlement preferences of Scandinavian emigrants to the United States, 1850–1960

Abstract

The greatest international migration in recent history has been the mass emigration of Europeans to the United States that began in earnest in the 1830's and continued well into the twentieth century. In the period since 1820, when the first records were kept by the Americans, more than 45,000,000 persons have emigrated to the United States.¹ While other areas of Europe contributed more emigrants than the Scandinavian countries, probably in no area, excepting Ireland, was the emigration as large in relation to the size of the population in the area.² While many historians and economists have written about various aspects of Scandinavian emigration to the United States, relatively little effort has been made to explain the settlement patterns of Scandinavian emigrants after their arrival in the New World. This paper attempts to use contemporary statistical estimation techniques to isolate factors affecting the locational preferences of persons emigrating from Scandinavian countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In short, we ask questions such as ‘Why did these emigrants settle where they did? Are observed settlement patterns consistent with the observations of other students of the question or with a priori expectations based on prevailing economic theory? Has the relative importance of the various factors explaining the geographical distribution of Scandinavian emigrants to the United States changed over time?’

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Notes on contributors

Lowell E. Gallaway

Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway are, respectively, Associate Professor and Professor of Economics at Ohio University. All calculations were conducted at the Ohio University Computer Center. The Authors are indebted to William Karis and Michael Hamant for their assistance in the data processing chores necessary to produce the results reported herein. Of course, final responsibility for the accuracy of the text and the analysis of the findings remains with the authors.