Exodus Netherlands, promised land America. Dutch immigration and settlement in the United States

Abstract

D settlement in North antedates that of almost every other European nation, except the English; it spans three and a half centuries. Yet despite the lengthy time span, Dutch ncm-immigration rather than immigration is the salient fact. For one of the most densely populated and land-starved nations of Europe, it is remarkable that less than 300,000 Netherlanders emigrated overseas from 1820 to 1920 (Table 1). Dutch labor, as one scholar remarked, showed little inclination toward long and adventurous voyages. The proverbial Dutch attachment to family, faith, and fatherland outweighed the appeal of overseas utopias. Among European nations, the Dutch ranked only tenth in the proportion of their population that emigrated overseas in the nineteenth century (Table 2), and in the United States in 1900 they ranked a lowly seventeenth among foreign-born groups. There are today an estimated 3 million persons of Dutch birth or ancestry in the States, or a little more than 1 percent of the population. This proportion is considerably smaller than at the birth of the new nation, when Dutch Americans, 80,000 strong, numbered nearly 3.5 percent of the populace. Unlike other Western European nations in the nineteenth century, the Dutch never contracted America fever. While its influence