Italian Americans
Italo-americani (Italian) | |
|---|---|
Italian American ancestry by PUMA and state according to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey in 2023 | |
| Total population | |
| Alone (one ancestry) 6,629,993 (2020 census) 2.00% of the total US population Alone or in combination 16,813,235 (2020 census) 5.07% of the total US population | |
| Languages | |
| |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Catholicism with small minorities practicing Greek Orthodoxy, Protestantism and Judaism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Corsican Puerto Ricans (also Corsican Americans), Maltese Americans, Sammarinese Americans and other Italians |
Italian Americans (Italian: italoamericani [ˌitaloameriˈkaːni]) are Americans who have full or partial Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwestern metropolitan areas, with significant communities also residing in many other major U.S. metropolitan areas.
Between 1820 and 2004, approximately 5.5 million Italians migrated to the United States during the Italian diaspora, in several distinct waves, with the greatest number arriving in the 20th century from Southern Italy. Initially, most single men, so-called birds of passage, sent remittance back to their families in Italy and then returned to Italy.
Immigration began to increase during the 1880s, when more than twice as many Italians immigrated than had in the five previous decades combined. From 1880 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the greatest surge of immigration brought more than 4 million Italians to the United States. The largest number of this wave came from Southern Italy, which at that time was largely agricultural and where much of the populace had been impoverished by centuries of foreign rule and heavy tax burdens. In the 1920s, 455,315 more immigrants arrived. Many of them came under the terms of the new quota-based immigration restrictions created by the Immigration Act of 1924.
Italian-Americans had a significant influence on American culture, making numerous contributions to visual arts, literature, cuisine, politics, sports, and music.