Most of those boats coming over in the big immigration waves of the early 20th century were full of Germans

Fascinating. I'd love to see numbers for how many people immigrated in the last century, and where they came from.

Quebec and its discontents is still a mystery to me. From where I'm standing, it looks like nothing so much as another case of crass, petty, nigh-racist nationalism. "Pur laine" bloodlines and all that--it's nazisoid.

It's sad that so often one apparently cannot defend tradition without falling into crazy discrimination and xenophobia.

Don't get me wrong--all the French Canadians I've met so far have been lovely people, but maybe that's a self-selected sample, those who moved to Ontario. :)

Lewiston hasn't been a paper town for a long while, although there used to be quite a few on the Androscoggin River. (Starting at Berlin, NH, which still smells like farts.)

Bates College is in Lewiston, and it's a very weird place for it, too.

Polack jokes are fairly common in Central Connecticut, where there are a lot of Polish last names. I don't remember what ethnicity was subbed in around Boston. (My guess would have been Portuguese, the Irish having a long history of professional ethnic pride.)

Yes, you too can have a region almost entirely populated by white people, and think of some way to find and magnify differences among them!!

There's a plurality of German Americans and their descendants among white Americans?

Yes. And it's fairly high too, though German-American were much more likely to mix with other ethnicities early on.

With or without removing Hispanics?

I think so, still. Hispanics are often divvied up into two categories with the EEO for Hispanic, White and Hispanic, Not So White. I'm not sure of their total numbers, but I still think German-Americans have the biggest single ethnic chunk.

I'd love to see numbers for how many people immigrated in the last century, and where they came from.

[link]

"Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850-1990"

Ask a genealogist and ye shall receive

From here [link] you can get a PDF report that says, among other things, that nearly 1 in 6 people reported German ancestry on the 2000 US Census.

In 2000, 42.8 million people (15 percent of the population) considered themselves to be of German (or part-German) ancestry, the most frequent response to the census question (Figure 2).4 Other ancestries with over 15 million people in 2000 included Irish (30.5 million, or 11 percent), African American (24.9 million, or 9 percent), English (24.5 million, or 9 percent), American (20.2 million, or 7 percent), Mexican (18.4 million, or 7 percent), and Italian (15.6 million, or 6 percent).

If 1 in 6 people report themselves to be .015625 German, and 1 in 10 report themselves half Irish, does a tree falling make any sound? And in what accent?

I never heard Polish jokes, growing up. They were always Italian jokes.

You never heard Irish jokes in New England, Cindy? Maybe that's more of a Boston thing.

I'm just glad I hit three of the top four.

I want to know how long you'd consider yourself ethnic. I call myself mongrel white American, because one German here or there three generations back does not an ethnicity make. (The English and Scottish people eight generations back, I think they've expired.)