Have Italian Americans switch population size with German Americans.

In real life, most Americans claim German heritage, which is most likely mixed with other ethnicities like Irish and English, but people seem to be reclaiming German heritage at the moment.

Meanwhile, although Italian Americans are a large group at around 17 million, they don't seem to be as spread around as German Americans who live around the Midwest and just all over, while Italians seem mostly restricted to the east coast.


Just check out the map below.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg

So what I would like to see is a way for Italians and Germans to switch places in that map, and to see how different American culture would be in such a reverse. Like for example, I am pretty sure that hamburgers come from Germans and I know pizza comes from Italians, but everybody just sees hamburgers as just American like appke pie, while pizza is well known to be Italian. There's also the Protestant and Catholic differences between the Germans and Italians.

So overall, how can we get Italians to be such a large group and what would be the repercussions on American culture?
 
Now, before I say anything, I should admit that I don't know nearly as much about Italian immigration history as I would like; so, if I say anything that is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.

Now, with that out of the way; this might be difficult. There are a few factors that really seem to favor the Germans in this case. First, they have a much longer presence in the United States, with some German communities in Pennsylvania and other states stretching back to the colonial period. Secondly, many of the German settlers that moved out West where recent arrivals fleeing the conservative backlash following the Revolution of 1848. They not only showed up at just the right take to help found several major United States cities (Milwaukee being the most dramatic example, but there are others), but many of their community leaders were highly trained and skilled professionals who had the funds needed to buy land. Finally, although Germans certainly were targeted by groups like the Know-Nothings, many of the immigrants were Protestants which meant that they were more acceptable in an American society that still viewed Catholics with a great deal of suspicion. (of course, there were Catholic Germans as well, as they did get the same ire thrown at them as other Catholics).

The Italians are largely the mirror opposites of the Germans in many ways (in fact, their experiences are more akin to the Irish immigrants in many ways). They began arriving later than the Germans, for instance. It has always been my understanding that one of the reasons you saw the Italians (and Irish) settle so heavily on the East Coast and not move as far inward, was a combination of factors, the largest being money. Many arrived at a time when free land in the west was much harder to come by, and they came with very little personal wealth. As a result, they didn't have the resources available to move further west. Secondly, after arriving in the urban centers, they quickly got jobs within the factories which further tied them to the locale. By this point, you have very vibrant ethnic communities forming and people have, for lack of a better term, settled down where they are. Finally, you have the rampant anti-Catholicism of the day which further reinforces people to stay within their ethnic communities, and also makes it more difficult for society at large to accept them.

One final factor, that needs to be discussed. Its an old story about how many immigrants who came to the United States only did so in order to make money and then planned on returning home. The funny thing is, its actually true. I remember reading an article about this some years back (and how do I suddenly wish I could remember its title and the statistics within it), but the Italians and Irish both had a sizable population that immigrated and then moved back to home after a number of years. I'm sure many more stayed in the United States, unable to build up the nest-egg that would be needed to go back home with wealth. Why is this important? Because, generally, you only go off and purchase land if your goal is to settle down. If your goal is to make enough money to send back to your family, and save some so you can go back home some day, you're not going to invest it in a farm. Its far easier, instead, to work at a factory job. And, where are the jobs during much of this period? In the industrial east coast cities.

So, I think, in order to get a larger and more influential Italian community, you are going to need to do a few things. Find a way for them to begin arriving earlier, have a larger middle-class(ish) contingent to the emigrants, and make them willing to come here and settle down so that they would be drawn to the western farmlands. They are still going to run into trouble due to their Catholicism, however.

Hopefully this helps you and, as I've said before, if I said anything glaringly incorrect there, please let me know! :)
 
Now, before I say anything, I should admit that I don't know nearly as much about Italian immigration history as I would like; so, if I say anything that is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.

Now, with that out of the way; this might be difficult. There are a few factors that really seem to favor the Germans in this case. First, they have a much longer presence in the United States, with some German communities in Pennsylvania and other states stretching back to the colonial period. Secondly, many of the German settlers that moved out West where recent arrivals fleeing the conservative backlash following the Revolution of 1848. They not only showed up at just the right take to help found several major United States cities (Milwaukee being the most dramatic example, but there are others), but many of their community leaders were highly trained and skilled professionals who had the funds needed to buy land. Finally, although Germans certainly were targeted by groups like the Know-Nothings, many of the immigrants were Protestants which meant that they were more acceptable in an American society that still viewed Catholics with a great deal of suspicion. (of course, there were Catholic Germans as well, as they did get the same ire thrown at them as other Catholics).

The Italians are largely the mirror opposites of the Germans in many ways (in fact, their experiences are more akin to the Irish immigrants in many ways). They began arriving later than the Germans, for instance. It has always been my understanding that one of the reasons you saw the Italians (and Irish) settle so heavily on the East Coast and not move as far inward, was a combination of factors, the largest being money. Many arrived at a time when free land in the west was much harder to come by, and they came with very little personal wealth. As a result, they didn't have the resources available to move further west. Secondly, after arriving in the urban centers, they quickly got jobs within the factories which further tied them to the locale. By this point, you have very vibrant ethnic communities forming and people have, for lack of a better term, settled down where they are. Finally, you have the rampant anti-Catholicism of the day which further reinforces people to stay within their ethnic communities, and also makes it more difficult for society at large to accept them.

One final factor, that needs to be discussed. Its an old story about how many immigrants who came to the United States only did so in order to make money and then planned on returning home. The funny thing is, its actually true. I remember reading an article about this some years back (and how do I suddenly wish I could remember its title and the statistics within it), but the Italians and Irish both had a sizable population that immigrated and then moved back to home after a number of years. I'm sure many more stayed in the United States, unable to build up the nest-egg that would be needed to go back home with wealth. Why is this important? Because, generally, you only go off and purchase land if your goal is to settle down. If your goal is to make enough money to send back to your family, and save some so you can go back home some day, you're not going to invest it in a farm. Its far easier, instead, to work at a factory job. And, where are the jobs during much of this period? In the industrial east coast cities.

So, I think, in order to get a larger and more influential Italian community, you are going to need to do a few things. Find a way for them to begin arriving earlier, have a larger middle-class(ish) contingent to the emigrants, and make them willing to come here and settle down so that they would be drawn to the western farmlands. They are still going to run into trouble due to their Catholicism, however.

Hopefully this helps you and, as I've said before, if I said anything glaringly incorrect there, please let me know! :)

Perhaps, Italian could be used as explorers in early colonial times, as they are hired by the various royals of Europe to explore the inland of the territories of the US. They could set up communities, as they stay in the territories making maps are charting everything for potential settlers. They would act as guides learning the forests and teaching it to the settlers from England. As a result there would be large Italian communities just like there were large German communities. About the Catholicism, I have no idea as I want them to stay Catholic, butas there are a lot of Irish Catholics there could still be a lot of Catholics from other countries.

With Italians having been in the US for a longer time plus having a great reputation of being explorers into the interior of the US, perhaps they could come from Italy and a higher rate starting from an earlier time. They could populate the West like the Germans did.
 
Didn´t most of the Italian immigration happen later than the German one? I am under the impression that the reason that Italians to a large extent lives in urban areas in the east is that they are latecomers and that they replaced people who had moved westwards.
 
In real life, most Americans claim German heritage,

To clarify, about 20% of the U.S. population claims German heritage. Now, that is more than any other ethnic origin*, but to say that "most Americans" are of this ancestry is an exaggeration.

Keep in mind that the map simply shows the largest single ethnic group per county. It doesn't tell us what percentage of the population that ethnic group actually forms.

*(The largest group actually is likely people of English ancestry, but many of them choose to identify as "American" instead.)
 
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One way to make this happen is for immigration concerns to be taken more seriously from the beginning, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about how concerned he was about the large amount of non-English immigration in 1763. While Franklin broadly discussed all mainland Europeans, African slaves, and even hypothetical Asian migration he was primarily worried about German migrants, having this concern turn into actual legislation could lead to German exclusion. Then you would probably need to make things better in Germany (if their quality of life is better the Germans would have no reason to move to a Germaniphobic nation like Alt-merica), presumably you would then need to make Italy worse to encourage more Italians to not only move to the States but plan to live in the country for the rest of their lives.
 
The main issue was that as mentioned above, German immigration was a much earlier phenomenon, dating back to the early 18th century. German immigration really began picking up in the 1830s and especially the 1840s and 1850s, with nearly 2 million Germans coming to the U.S. between 1830 and 1859 alone. In contrast, a mere 12,000 Italians immigrated during the same period, making them a very small group.

The Germans arriving during the first half of the 19th century had the benefit of available farm land opening up to them in the Midwest. As land was plentiful, the German immigrants were able to settle large swaths of land with entire families and form homogeneous rural communities where German often remained the primary language, at least until World War I. Also, as the bulk of German immigrants arrived before steamship travel, temporary migration to United States would have been much more difficult. This was followed by more immigrants from German-speaking regions, and another 3 million arrived in the United States between 1860-1890. However, after the peak year of German immigration in 1882, the numbers began to decline, with just half a million between 1890 and 1914. As a result, the number of German-born residents in the U.S. declined from 2.3 million in 1910 to 1.7 million in 1920 and 2.7 million in 1900. Of these nearly 2.7 million in 1900, they were far more spread out than the Italian immigrants with some 480,000 in New York state, 332,000 in Illinois, 243,000 in Wisconsin, 212,000 in Pennsylvania, and 204,000 in Ohio.

Just as German immigration was decreasing, Italian immigration was increasing. In the 1880s, over a quarter of a million Italians arrived in the U.S., and although this number was still smaller than many other nationalities, it would increase to 600,000 in the 1890s, and to over 3 million between 1900 and 1920, the peak years of Italian immigration. Despite, these large numbers, they were overwhelmingly males and around half returned to Italy. As a result, there were only 1.2 million Italian-born residnts in the U.S. in 1920, a gain of 135,000 from 1910, and 794,000 from 1900. Of these the vast majority were concentrated in cities along the East Coast and what is now the rust belt, with nearly 400,000 or one-third in New York City. Philadelphia and Chicago were next with around 64,000 and 59,000 respectively, then Boston with 38,000 and Newark with 27,000, and San Francisco being the only other city with over 20,000 with just under 24,000 Italian-born residents. As of 1921, 81% of Italian-born residents lived in cities of 100,000 or more, making them far more urban than any other immigrant group, with the exception of the Jews.

Before the industrial age Italian emigration was much smaller than other regions of Europe. There were some 550,000 Italian emigrants from Italy between 1789 and 1876, and nearly half of these settled in South America, with Argentina being the main destination. The majority of these migrants, however came from Northern Italy. What hampered earlier large-scale emigration from Italy was likely the more agrarian nature of the country with the lack of inexpensive passage to the United States. Italians might not have had the experience or ability to farm the plains, unlike the Germans, many of whom were Volga Germans from similar regions of what is today Ukraine. When Italians began immigrating to the U.S. in large numbers, they came overwhelmingly from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (80%), and many were desperately poor and illiterate. They filled the gap for cheap labour in America's industrial cities, which boomed in the 1880s-1914. Also, many would leave during economic downturns such as in 1908 when the number of Italians departing was double that of arrivals. When the lax immigration rules came to an end in the 1920s, many Italian men called over their wives, allowing the building of more established urban enclaves in the country. This was not dissimilar to what was happening in Brazil and Argentina where return migration ratios during the 1900-1914 period were equal to that of the U.S. Leading to the conclusion that these were overwhelmingly economic migrants, with the explicit intention to earn money and return home. The number of Southern Italian Italians heading to Argentina during the 1900-1914 period accounted for nearly half of Italian immigrant arrivals, a change from earlier decades where the vast majority were from northern Italy, though southerners were still a smaller portion of the immigrants during this period than in the U.S. or Canada.
 
There's nothing necessarily stopping Italian immigration from being as big as German migration, even with the Catholic aspect--a barrier, but not an insurmountable one. There's still big city political machines to "help" them no matter which urban area they go to. And they evidently did settle outside the East Coast, if all these random back roads I've seen in rural Tennessee that seem to be named after people of Italian ancestry is any indication.

The main issue is the fact that many went to Latin America, and Italy was never as populous as Germany.
 
You'd need to change the target of Italian immigration, mostly. Go south to Argentina, and you'll get two thirds of the population being descendants of Italian immigrants.
 
Something would need to happen to increase Italian immigration to the United States greatly, perhaps at the expense of immigration to other destinations, at an earlier date. I have no idea what could do this, since I'm unaware of any close ties between the United States, the Thirteen Colonies that preceded it, England and Scotland, and any state or community in the Italian peninsula. With Germany, for instance, the Thirteen Colonies were bound to Germany via England through all manner of dynastic, political, and economic ties. Nothing like that binds them to Italy. With no connections, how can you get migration?

The late 19th century migration of Waldensians does hint at the potential for a link. Do the British monarchs resettle these pseudo-Protestants? The problem with this is that Italy's largely Roman Catholic population would be immune to the call for religious freedom in British North America.

If you want to go back earlier, perhaps New France's population might have ended up getting boosted by Italian migrants. Links between France and the Two Sicilies? How you would get these links, and make New France such a relatively noteworthy destination for immigration is one challenge. It's a huger challenge to have the United States emerge with such a potentially larger New France surrounding it.
 
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