Different European immigration patterns in US

[Melvin Loh]

How could the patterns of European immigration thruout the course of US hist have been different, starting from the mid-18th C onwards ? There were as I understand certain parts of the country which attracted large nos. of immigrants who tended to be from particular European countries and regions, such as Irish and Italians into big cities on the east coast and in the midwest, Scandanavians into Minnesota and the Plains states, Germans into different places at different times- such as into Pennsylvania during colonial times, Texas during the 1830s, and Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska during the 1850s 'Bloody Kansas' period, eastern Europeans into Pittsburg, Detroit and other industrial cities during the late 19th and early 20th C, Russian Jews into NY, Armenians to California, French-Canadians into northern New England, Portuguese to southern New England coastal towns, etc. What potential factors could have caused these demographic/ethnographic population concentrations in the OTL US to have changed ?

 

[David Howery]

a cooler winter in the year of the Irish potato famine would likely have prevented the famine, and the Irish influx into the US would have been less...

 

[wkwillis]

Famines, pogroms, and steam.

Say, Napoleon conquers most of continental Europe but doesn't go to war with Haiti and doesn't go to war with Russia and Austria. It still is in a cold war with the UK. Latin America still becomes independent in various sized chunks. The UK doesn't try to start the war of 1812 with the US and we continue our economic development without a pause.
France build steamships to compete with the Uk despite the UK's dominance in naval stores. This helps develop railroads which connect the interior of Europe to the ports for the steamship lines. The railroads connect up the coal areas of northern Europe to the citrus and other agricultural areas of southern Europe.
Ireland gets independence because the UK goes broke in the long naval cold war with France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Benelux. This means that they don't put all their efforts into potatos, but develop industry and diversify their agriculture. No potato famine. A smaller population because you don't want to split up your family owned farm, unlike if you are a tenant farmer and your income depends on working children.
France develops rayon earlier in emulation of their sugar beet efforts, so we lose slavery sooner, and less violently. We develop faster without a civil war and freed black people move to the frontier areas like Texas because the white people already own the land in the southeast.
New York stays small without the Eire canal dominating grain transport for a generation. The railroads connect the Ohio and Great Lakes to Baltimore and Philadelphia before they connect to New York and Boston. There is no post civil war agreement on which Pacific coast railroad route to take, the south, the north, or the central, so we don't build a transcontinental railroad until 1885, and the population of the west coast gets more freed blacks and more direct European immigrants by sea.
The ethnic picture of America is very, very, different. Fewer Irish and fewer New Yorkers in general. New England is still Wasp. The southwest is majority black. California is Balkan and Ukrainian and Jewish, with a four way religious split between Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Orthodox sects.

 

[Paul Spring]

If Russia liberalized more in the 19th century, and there were no pogroms or systematic discrimination against Jews and other non-Russians in the Russian Empire, there would be a lot less Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, and Mennonite immigration. (A note about this last group - There were a number of German Mennonite communities that were originally been invited to Russia under Catherine the Great. They settled in the Volga River area and adapted to farming on the steppes. They were promised toleration in Catherine's time, but faced heavy discrimination from the increasingly nationalist Russian authorities in the later 19th century. Quite a few of them came to the US and Canada, settling in the plains - Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, Saskatchewan - places that had similar conditions to the steppe land they had learned how to farm well in Russia. One story I've heard is that they inadvertently brought tumbleweeds to North America with them - the tumbleweed is actually a native of the Asian steppes.)

 

[Faeelin]

Ireland gets independence because the UK goes broke in the long naval cold war with France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Benelux. This means that they don't put all their efforts into potatos, but develop industry and diversify their agriculture. No potato famine. A smaller population because you don't want to split up your family owned farm, unlike if you are a tenant farmer and your income depends on working children.
France develops rayon earlier in emulation of their sugar beet efforts, so we lose slavery sooner, and less violently. We develop faster without a civil war and freed black people move to the frontier areas like Texas because the white people already own the land in the southeast.

Hmm. Whose financing our industrial revolution, and is europe united?