Expert: John Shea - 11/24/2006

Question
Hi Mr. Shea,

I have always been interested in how & why various ethnic groups chose to settle in certain regions of America. Why do Milwaukee, Cinncinnati, & St. Louis seem to have the largest German populations in the U.S. Was there something special about these areas? Why did the Scotch-Irish choose to settle in Appalachia, where the living was & still is hard, after they came from a country of hardship? It seems if they had moved to the cities where the economy was brighter, they would of endured less trials.
Could you recommend any material or book(s) which would assist me in understanding all of this?

I thank you greatly!

Sincerely,

Mike

Answer
Mike
This is really outside my area, but I'm going to venture an answer because by chance I recently saw a book about this subject, I think it was "Coming to America" or "American Immigration".  It was a large-format book in our public library, possibly published by National Geographic.  The answers you seek might be in that book.  You can probably locate it on Amazon.com by a keyword search on either migration or immigration.
For what it's worth, some significant part of the distribution of the different ethnic groups in North America probably has to do with what transportation networks were like at the point when particular countries or regions sent big waves of immigrants over here.  So, for example, lots of Scots and Irish in Appalachia because that was the frontier of effective transport and the locus of entry-level work (mining, timber) when big numbers of those populations started coming over here (Scots earlier on, Irish later).  The large numbers of Scandinavians and Germans out in the Midwest probably has more to to with railway networks than any preference for particular habitats.  For example, Africans were initially concentrated in the South, but that reflected the persistence of large-scale plantation slavery there until the 1860s.  As soon as opportunities to disperse elsewhere emerged in the 20th Century, large numbers of African-Americans did so.  Similar pattern in distribution of EastAsian immigrants, -mainly in Western US until mid-20th Century, then more broadly dispersed afterwards.  
Cheers,
John Shea