Irish American

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Irish population of the USA 1872
U.S. Irish population in counties as per 2000 census

Irish Americans are residents of the United States of Irish descent.

Immigration Pattern and Denomination

Many Protestant Irish immigrated to America during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were followed by millions of Irish Catholics during and after the Great Famine (1845-1852) . While Irish Catholics make up 16 percent of Catholics in the United States , the majority of this population was Protestant , according to a 2014 study by the General Social Survey ( University of Chicago ). Of the approximately 40 million Irish-Americans (35 million from the Republic of Ireland , 5 from Northern Ireland ), approximately 20 million were Protestants and 13 million Catholics (the rest of them did not give any denomination); active churchgoers were 40 percent each. Of the evangelicals in the Southern Irish Americans make up about 20 percent; many of them joined the Southern Baptists there. According to many sociologists, Irish-Americans now belong to the group of late ethnicity or late-generation ethnicity , which is characterized by long-term integration into the recipient society and a dried up influx from the society of origin. While the Irish-born US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted an end to the ethnic identity of Irish-Americans in 1963, he declared a new awareness of being Irish in the United States in the 1970s.

Demographics

After the German-Americans , they are the second largest ethnic group of the white population with around 34.7 million (in the United States Census 2010 ) and are proportionally strongly represented in the northeastern United States in particular . 22 million (7.2 percent of the total population) stated that they had predominantly Irish ancestors, a further 13.5 million therefore had some Irish ancestors (11.6 percent of the population in total). The state with the largest percentage of Irish people is Massachusetts . In 2014, according to the United States Census Bureau, 21.5 percent of the state's residents said they had Irish ancestors; They achieve particularly high proportions in the Boston area with almost half of the population in Braintree (42.3 percent), Scituate , Hanover , Marshfield and Norwell . The only other state where Irish Americans were over 20 percent was New Hampshire in 2014 . The largest population of Irish Americans in 2014 was California with 2.5 million, New York with 2.3 and Pennsylvania with 2.1 million. The majority of the Irish settled in the cities of the United States and formed a large part of the workforce. Districts with a strong Irish influence are South Boston or Hell's Kitchen in New York City .

Voting behavior

For a long time, their voting behavior was characterized by an overwhelming loyalty to the Democratic Party , especially since Irish people dominated the political machine of the party bosses, especially in Chicago , which changed with the increasing prosperity of many Irish people in the course of the 20th century. The trend towards the Republican Party was particularly evident in the 2016 presidential election ; some polls saw the Republican Donald Trump among those who called themselves Irish-American, ahead of the Democrat Hillary Clinton , but in some cases only just barely - and thus significantly less of a lead for Trump than among other white ethnic groups .

List of Irish Americans

The Kennedy family is one of the most famous Irish Catholics .

literature

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ^ John Simkin: Irish Immigration. In: Spartacus Educational , September 1997; Sheila Langan: Shock survey shows Irish Americans are more Protestant than Catholic. In: Irish Central , March 22, 2014.
  2. ^ Liam Kennedy: How Irish America thinks, votes and acts. In: The Irish Times , June 3, 2017.
  3. ^ Liam Kennedy: How Irish America thinks, votes and acts. In: The Irish Times , June 3, 2017.
  4. ↑ Jed Kolko: America's Most Irish Towns. In: Forbes.com , March 15, 2013.
  5. ↑ Shannon Young: Massachusetts among top states claiming Irish Ancestry, US Census Bureau finds. In: MassLive , March 17, 2016.
  6. ^ John Simkin: Irish Immigration. In: Spartacus Educational , September 1997.
  7. ^ John Simkin: Irish Immigration. In: Spartacus Educational , September 1997.
  8. ^ Liam Kennedy: How Irish America thinks, votes and acts. In: Irish Times , June 3, 2017.
  9. ^ Peter F. Stevens: As a majority of Irish Americans reportedly embrace Trump, lessons hard-learned by our immigrant ancestors are evaporating. In: Boston Irish Reporter , September 6, 2016; Peter Aldhous, Jeremy Singer-Vine: Which White People Support Trump? In: BuzzFeed , October 9, 2016.