Why isn’t it English by far?
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The largest flow of German immigration to America occurred between 1820 and World War I, during which time nearly six million Germans immigrated to the United States. From 1840 to 1880, they were the largest group of immigrants.
1. For most of the time US was a British colony in the 18th Century, Britain was in a royal union with Hanover in Germany so many rich landowners and aristocrats had German as well as British ancestry.
2. There was a large wave of migration to the US from Germany in the middle of the 19th Century as a result of the failed liberal revolutionary movements in Germany and upheaval caused by the conquest and unification of Germany by Prussia.
Is American an ancestry option in this data? If so, I imagine that a large amount of self-identifying Americans are English. I am looking at [this map](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/2023/10/white-population/figure-4-white-population.jpg) where American is not an option, and English seems have a larger number. On [this map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg) however with American as an option, you can see that that English ancestry is replaced with American. The later map probably experience more vote splitting between English and American, which results in Germany being the largest single group.
english ancestry americans have been america for 300+ years for the most part and don’t identify as english – they identify as american. Thus the second largest group (german) becomes the largest immigrant ancestry, because the first largest one isn’t thought of as an immigrant ancestry anymore.
There were some very large waves of German immigration into the American colonies while it was still a British colony. there were also massive waves of immigrants from various countries, particularly from the mid 1800’s through the middle of the 20th century. Those numbers dwarfed the relatively small population of the original British colonies. It’s also self-reporting so a lot of people whose ancestors were here before 1776 have lived in America for 250+ years and may not even know what their ancestry really is.
There were some very large waves of German immigration into the American colonies while it was still a British colony. there were also massive waves of immigrants from various countries, particularly from the mid 1800’s through the middle of the 20th century. Those numbers dwarfed the relatively small population of the original British colonies. It’s also self-reporting so a lot of people whose ancestors were here before 1776 have lived in America for 250+ years and may not even know what their ancestry really is.
If you treat all the ethnicities of what is now Britain as a single group, then it is the largest ethnicity in the United States… and if you add in Irish, then it is *by far* the largest group. Here’s the [breakdown by label](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Americans):
* English: 25.2 million
* “American”: 13.3 million
* This label can technically be anything. But it is most often used by people in the Upland South, who are primarily of various British origins.
* Scottish: 5.3 million
* “British”: 1.9 million
* Welsh: 1.8 million
This alone already adds up to; 47.5 million. The number for comparison for “German” is that 44.9 million Americans use that as their ancestry label… although even then, only 15.4 million choose that as their *only* label.
Note that there are also another 31.5 million for whom “Irish” is their label for their ethnicity.
So in some ways, the real answer is this: *because* the US was a British colony, and not a German colony, Americans have maintained a strong sense that Scottish and English people are different groups, and simply did not maintain a sense that Prussians and Bavarians are different groups. (Not even if it’s true.)
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One thing remains unambiguously true, however: more Americans do take “German” as a label for their heritage, than specifically take “English” as a label for their heritage. This is true even if you add the “American” and “British” labels in.
The US really was a pan-British colony, and pan-British ethnic labels remain the majority; however, there really were *a lot* of people who immigrated to the United States from Germany.
Most of the US as it stands was never a British colony. Not even all of the original 13 were predominatly British. English immigration waves were a long while ago, with plenty of more recent additions to override it in what people are aware of and dilute it. German was a strong part of that.
Recency bias and the fact that the data is self-reported.
People are more likely to know the origin of ancestors who immigrated more recently. An American with German ancestors who arrived in the 1880s and English ancestors who arrived in the 1600s is more likely to know about the German ancestors.
Also the more recent ancestors will typically be less mixed. That German grandmother who immigrated is just German. The other grandmother who isn’t an immigrant is part English, part Scottish, part Dutch, part French…so which one to choose? It’s easier to claim that solid one quarter German than to clam a mish mash of who knows what.
North America was the colony of many European countries, not just the UK. There were French, Dutch, Spanish, British, and even Russian colonies. But those colonies had relatively small populations compared to the number of immigrants that entered North America from the 1700’s to the 1900’s. At the time of the Revolutionary War, German speaking countries in Europe (there wasn’t a “Germany” until 1871) were divided in their support for the US. But there were many German speaking people in the colonies already. Most, like the Amish, kept out of the war. The German state of Hesse-Cassel famously sent 30,000 troops to support Britain. Many of them decided to remain in the US after the war. The number of German speaking people in the new USA was high enough that on January 13, 1795, Congress considered a proposal, not to give German any official status, but merely to print the federal laws in German as well as English. During the debate, a motion to adjourn failed by one vote.
It is interesting to consider the history of the 20th century had the US become a German speaking country, rather than an English speaking one.
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