Italo-American
| Total population | |
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| Regions with significant populations | |
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New York, New Jersey, New England, Pennsylvania California, Florida, Ohio, Illinois, with growing populations in Southwest and Southeast. |
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| Religion | |
| 72% Roman Catholic; 14% Protestant, 2% Christian – unspecified; 14% other | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Italian Canadians, Italian Argentines, Italian Uruguayans, Italian Brazilians, Italian Mexicans, Italian Australians, Italian South Africans, Italian Britons, Italian New Zealanders, Sicilian Americans and other Italians |
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| 1910 |
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| ^a Foreign-born population only | |
Italian Americans (Italian: italoamericani or italo-americani [ˌitalo.ameriˈkaːni]) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans who have full or partial ancestry from Italy. Italian Americans are the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States (not including American ethnicity, an ethnonym used by many in the United States; overall, Italian Americans rank seventh, behind German American, Irish American, African American, English American, American, and Mexican American)..
About 5.5 million Italians immigrated to the United States from 1820 to 2004. Immigration began to increase during the 1870s, when more than twice as many Italians immigrated (1870–79: 46,296) than during the five previous decades combined (1820–69: 22,627). The 1870s were followed by the greatest surge of immigration, which occurred in the period between 1880 and 1914 and brought more than 4 million Italians to the United States, the great majority being from Southern Italy and Sicily, with most having agrarian backgrounds. This period of large scale immigration ended abruptly with the onset of the First World War in 1914 and, except for one year (1922), never fully resumed. Further immigration would be greatly limited by a number of restrictive laws passed by Congress in the 1920s.
Approximately 84% of the Italian immigrants came from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This was the poorest and least developed part of the country, still largely rural and agricultural, where much of the populace had been impoverished by centuries of foreign misrule, and an oppressive taxation system imposed after Italian unification in 1861. After unification, the Italian government initially encouraged emigration to relieve economic pressures in the South. After the American Civil War, which resulted in over a half million killed or wounded, immigrant workers were recruited from Italy and elsewhere to fill the labor shortage caused by the war. In the United States, most Italians began their new lives as manual laborers in Eastern cities, mining camps and in agriculture. The descendants of the Italian immigrants gradually rose from a lower economic class in the first generation (1890s–1920s) to a level comparable to the national average by 1970. By 1990, more than 65% of their descendants were managerial, professional, or white-collar workers. The Italian community has often been characterized by strong ties to family, the Roman Catholic Church, fraternal organizations, and political parties.
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