AHC: More Spanish-Americans, by which I mean people who immigrated *directly* from Spain to the United States and their descendants. (Immigrants from Latin America--even if entirely of Spanish descent--do not count, not do those who immigrated from Spain to Texas or New Mexico, etc. before these areas became part of the United States.) I know there's the obvious argument that it was easier for Spaniards who wanted to emigrate to come to Latin America, where they would not have to learn a new language. Yet after all, millions of non-English-speaking people came to the United States from countries other than Spain, and if the US had other advantages over Latin America (in terms of standard of living, for example) there seems no reason these advantages could not offset the language problem.
Indeed, according to the *Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups* (1980), article "Spaniards" (pp. 948-950) "More than 250,000 Spaniards have come to the United States directly from Spain since US authorities began keeping records in 1820...The timing of Spanish immigration to the United States is largely responsible for its relative invisibility. Half the Spaniards who have come since 1820 arrived between 1900 and 1924 and were lost among the great waves of southern and eastern Europeans who arrived in the same period..." By the mid-1920's, of course, the quota system prevented any large-scale immigration, though it is questionable whether it would have taken place in any event; in fact, a considerable number of Spanish-American immigrants "returned to Spain or moved on to another country (usually in Latin America)." (p. 949)
Another reason for the relative invisibility of direct immigrants from Spain is that "immigrants were less likely to regard themselves as Spaniards than as Galicians, Basques, Asturians, or Catalonians. There is little evidence that the Spaniards in the United States have ever worked to maintain a separate identity or community."
https://books.google.com/books?id=W2MWDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1989
So again, my question is how you get a large number of immigrants from Spain to the United States before the imposition of quotas in the 1920's? Probably making Latin America less attractive is essential, but how? (Have places like Argentina descend into poverty and war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?)
The POD can either be before or after 1900.