How diverse were European cities in the early 20th century?

[memph]

Originally Posted by Docere

No. Winnipeg, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto were all more diverse than London then.

Toronto wasn't especially diverse then, but people of non-Anglo Celtic origins made up a larger proportion of the population than they did in London. It was about as Jewish/Italian as Baltimore, so sort of second tier in terms of early 20th century continental European immigration.

Interesting, London must have been pretty non-diverse then because I think >85% of Toronto's population was Anglo Celtic in the early 20th century.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Another contrast -- the least diverse US city in the 20th century (I have no idea what the contenders would be)

I wonder if any American city can be said to have been ethnically homogeneous in the early 20th century? I think by the late 19th century and early 20th century, nearly all US cities had become diverse through at least immigration if not internal migration.

Is there any US equivalent of the overwhelmingly majority Anglo-Celtic Australian cities (or even majority Anglo-Celtic pre-war Canadian cities)?

[Docere]

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

For which year was this true? Are the Irish considered foreign born in those figures?

In any case, the number of foreign-born residents paints only part of the picture. Britain and France were (and still are) ethnically diverse countries themselves. Both the Welsh and Scottish certainly had a presence in London, and I would assume Bretons and members of France's other native ethnic groups were present in Paris as well.

Wgflamip raises an interesting point here. If we give lots of "diversity points" to the different British Isles nations, then one could argue Sydney and Melbourne were "more diverse" because they were proportionately much more "non-English" than London was. On the other hand, London had a sizable Jewish immigrant population (one of the largest in the Western world even though only a small percentage of the population that basically avoided Australia (Australian Jews are mostly post-war). It also had more other continental Europeans, though the proportions were tiny in all three.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

Wgflamip raises an interesting point here. If we give lots of "diversity points" to the different British Isles nations, then one could argue Sydney and Melbourne were "more diverse" because they were proportionately much more "non-English" than London was. On the other hand, London had a sizable Jewish immigrant population (one of the largest in the Western world even though only a small percentage of the population that basically avoided Australia (Australian Jews are mostly post-war). It also had more other continental Europeans, though the proportions were tiny in all three.

Why did Jewish and other continental Europeans avoid Australia so much? North America and the UK simply being that much more attractive and closer? Was it avoidance on the part of the immigrants or lack of welcoming/barriers on the part of Australia?

[Docere]

Originally Posted by memph

Interesting, London must have been pretty non-diverse then because I think >85% of Toronto's population was Anglo Celtic in the early 20th century.

About 20% were not British/Irish in 1931. 9% were born in continental Europe. 47,000 Jews (7.5%) and 15,500 Italians (2.6%).

London would have been well over 90% Anglo Celtic at the time. 3% Jewish. 3-4% foreign born (mostly continental Europe and US). All the other non-Anglo Celtic groups were less than 1% each.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

Wgflamip raises an interesting point here. If we give lots of "diversity points" to the different British Isles nations, then one could argue Sydney and Melbourne were "more diverse" because they were proportionately much more "non-English" than London was. On the other hand, London had a sizable Jewish immigrant population (one of the largest in the Western world even though only a small percentage of the population that basically avoided Australia (Australian Jews are mostly post-war). It also had more other continental Europeans, though the proportions were tiny in all three.

Perhaps linguistic/cultural diversity should come into play too -- how "Irish" in culture/language were the Irish in North America, Australia and the UK compared to each other?

I know in Boston, there were plenty of Irish speakers in the 19th century, even if they'd assimilate later, I heard it took a while. The Irish language survived well in the Canadian diaspora too. There's also examples of non-English British Isles languages in diasporas ranging from Cape Breton Gaelic to Patagonian Welsh.

Not sure if non-English British Isles languages ever followed the immigrants to Australia, or if non-English living in London still spoke them in large numbers. If so, I haven't read much about them.

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by Docere

I read somewhere that there were about three times as many immigrants as Paris alone as there were in all of Germany in the early 20th century.

Were a majority of the tiny immigrant population of Germany Eastern European Jews? I read that of the 500,000 or so Jews in Germany in the Weimar period, about 20% were "foreign" Jews.

From what I understand:

After WW1, the French adopted a policy of importing immigrant workers to fill labor shortages, then expelling them in times of crisis and unemployment (most notably under the Laval government in 1935). In contrast, Weimar Germany had little need for migrant workers because its economy was a shitshow for most of the period. It also had a significant number of migrants impossible to class as foreigners, because they were ethnic Germans displaced from the Reich's lost territories following the Paris treaties, or from the territory of newly-created Slavic states. (I suppose you wouldn't count these if you were describing its immigrant population as tiny).

I think for these reasons, other migrants tended to use Germany only as a point of transit, and campaigns to round up and deport immigrants (especially Ostjuden) were more frequent. Russians who emigrated in 1917 settled first in Berlin, but ultimately moved on to Paris.

[Docere]

memph, FYI:

http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=232707

[Capsicum]

I think one reason France had a lot of immigrants early on and a high % foreign born, relative to other European countries, was that France was earlier than other European countries in starting the trend of having fewer kids, already having a fertility drop back in the 18th century.

Interestingly, France has alternated between periods of low and high natural growth from then until now. It's at around replacement rate now currently (2 births per woman) which is still high by western countries' standards (which are often below replacement).

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/...nds-in-france/

"France went through the second demographic transition in the middle of the eighteenth century and its population lagged behind those of Germany and Great Britain. While citizens of these last two countries immigrated, France imported migrants from other Catholic countries such as Belgium, Italy, Poland and Spain. The French government also took pro-natality measures such as such as family allowances.

While originally Europe’s most populated country, France’s slide into lower birth rates preceded the other countries of the continent by approximately 100 years. At the end of the 1930s, the country had the world’s oldest population."

[Capsicum]

France undergoing a demographic transition to lower fertility much earlier than most other countries in the late 18th and 19th century also explains why there were so few French emigrants in the 19th century relative to many other continental European countries.

Most French descendants in North America are descended from colonial settlers during the time of New France (who had high fertility rates), not immigrants from France itself who arrived after the US or Canada become countries.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Docere

Vienna and Prague also became less German speaking over time, though those from Czech lands and others in Vienna assimilated into the German-speaking population. Prague however became more Czech in the late 19th century and early 20th century (Bohemia had some autonomy in the Austrian half of the empire.)

BTW is your mother adamant about being Central European?

I think she would say she's Canadian > Hungarian > any kind of greater European identity. If she's using the term "Eastern European" to relate to Hungary it would be under the context of "countries oppressed by the USSR". I think the Mongols, Ottomans and Russians/Soviets are generally seen as the main historical enemies of Hungarians.

Although my mother doesn't hold any enmity against Russians as individuals, culturally she would still associate more with "Central Europe", including Germans, than people from former USSR countries or the Balkans.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Encolpius

From what I understand:

After WW1, the French adopted a policy of importing immigrant workers to fill labor shortages, then expelling them in times of crisis and unemployment (most notably under the Laval government in 1935). In contrast, Weimar Germany had little need for migrant workers because its economy was a shitshow for most of the period. It also had a significant number of migrants impossible to class as foreigners, because they were ethnic Germans displaced from the Reich's lost territories following the Paris treaties, or from the territory of newly-created Slavic states. (I suppose you wouldn't count these if you were describing its immigrant population as tiny).

I think for these reasons, other migrants tended to use Germany only as a point of transit, and campaigns to round up and deport immigrants (especially Ostjuden) were more frequent. Russians who emigrated in 1917 settled first in Berlin, but ultimately moved on to Paris.

Since citizenship is not automatically granted at birth in Germany, the citizenship figures likely include immigrants and their children.

For 1933, there were 98,747 "foreign" Jews in Germany in 1933 (19.8% of all Jews in Germany), of whom 56,480 had Polish citizenship.

In Berlin, 30% of Jews were "foreign."

Jews represented 38% of those with Polish citizenship in Germany, so altogether there were about 150,000 Polish citizens in Germany.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=QEK...anders&f=false

[Sun Belt]

Originally Posted by James Bond Agent 007

Well, just because they had darker skin back then doesn't mean it was "diverse." If everybody there had that color skin, then it wasn't diverse.

No and that was not the point.

Somewhere in the timeline Britain went from all black to all white and that occurred just over a couple thousand years ago. That is if you believe the current theory.

If what occurred in the past were to continue in the future then today's diverse environment, due to the lack of UV rays and cloudy conditions, would ultimately become a homogenous [probably white] populace in the future, no matter who lives there today.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Is there any US equivalent of the overwhelmingly majority Anglo-Celtic Australian cities (or even majority Anglo-Celtic pre-war Canadian cities)?

I'm guessing probably not, since any city primarily Anglo-Celtic (and with little continental European in the 19th or early 20th century) among the European descended population in the US would be mostly Southern, which would also have Black Americans. Western US cities would also have lots of continental European (and the Southwest would have Hispanics too).

I don't think there'd be places in the US that were 80-90+% Anglo-Celtic that were also big cities, in the early 20th century.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

I'm guessing probably not, since any city primarily Anglo-Celtic (and with little continental European in the 19th or early 20th century) among the European descended population in the US would be mostly Southern, which would also have Black Americans. Western US cities would also have lots of continental European (and the Southwest would have Hispanics too).

I don't think there'd be places in the US that were 80-90+% Anglo-Celtic that were also big cities, in the early 20th century.

What were the stats like for Salt Lake City, Denver, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Seattle and Portland? Did Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha have over >20% continental Europeans? Granted those were smallish, around 100,000 to 300,000 back then.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by memph

What were the stats like for Salt Lake City, Denver, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Seattle and Portland? Did Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha have over >20% continental Europeans? Granted those were smallish, around 100,000 to 300,000 back then.

The Pacific Northwest, North Dakota and Minnesota was pretty Nordic/Scandinavian in the 19th and 20th century, so I'd imagine that Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis did.

https://medium.com/migration-issues/...c-3b32878403a3

[Capsicum]

I'd imagine the bigger Midwestern US cities also had large %'s continental European in the early 20th century considering many were a tenth to a third foreign born, and this was a time when much of the foreign born share would have been continental European.

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

Obviously a lot less than they are today, and a lot less diverse than American cities. But it would be interesting to look at some stats nonetheless.

Obviously immigration woul have played more of a role in cities like London and Paris, while a city like Vienna reflected the diversity of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and was filled with Czechs, Hungarians, Galician Jews etc.

Just a thought -- there's often talk about "return migration". How likely was it that European cities had a high percentage of return migrants from the Americas, or elsewhere?

http://cmsny.org/publications/2018sm...gration/#_ftn1

"Between 1860 and 1930, more than a quarter of all migrants returned to Europe (Baines 1991)".

I don't know if there's stats to reflect this -- probably most return migrants aren't going to show up demographically unless we also count "second generational return" -- where American-born numbers show up in European cities. If the return migrants are also the same ethnicity and self-identify as such then they won't show up in the diversity stats too.

Today there's situations where return migrants can make up large shares of certain countries.

For example, in only a span of half a decade there were a million Mexican-descent people that moved from the US to Mexico, implying really high return migration.

From 2009 to 2014, 1 million Mexicans and their families (including U.S.-born children) left the U.S. for Mexico, according to data from the 2014 Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (ENADID).

I wonder how many say, Scandinavian, Italian or Irish cities had high shares of return migrants in the 20th century.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by memph

What were the stats like for Salt Lake City, Denver, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Seattle and Portland? Did Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha have over >20% continental Europeans? Granted those were smallish, around 100,000 to 300,000 back then.

Salt Lake City would have been the most homogeneous Anglo Saxon of these cities, and Nashville would have had a homogeneous white population as well.

The Upstate NY cities all had big Italian populations, Buffalo a big Polish population, Minneapolis had Scandinavians etc.

Milwaukee was mostly German and Germans were pretty big in most cities.

[Capsicum]

Even though the US is more ethnically diverse than Canada or Australia in terms of having fewer people of British Isles descent, you couldn't really tell this from the surname data, so a lot of continental Europeans probably Anglicized their names as they assimilated (eg. Mueller to Miller).

The top surnames in the US tend to be English in origin (not that different from English Canada or Australia) or Anglicized, and the ones that aren't are Spanish.



US dominant surnames by state are still overwhelmingly English-derived with a few hints of local diversity (eg. Spanish names in the Southwest from CA to TX, the Scandinavian "Olson" in ND, and Irish "Sullivan" in MA, and rather unique for the US, the odd outlier of Asian names in HI). Even the heavily "white ethnic" east coast has its Smiths, Browns and Johnsons, and no really distinctive Italian, German, Eastern European names show up on the US map of top three at least by state.