Migration from Eastern Europe to the US 1820-1957

Between 1820 and 1957, approximately 3.8 million people migrated from Eastern Europe and Russia (which officially became the Soviet Union in 1922) to the United States. Although migration from Western Europe to the US had already increased significantly in the early 1800s, it was not until the 1870s that Eastern Europeans began to migrate in mass. The period with the highest rate of migration was between the turn of the twentieth century and the Russian Revolution, before it dropped drastically, and despite a small resurgence in the early 1920s, the numbers from both regions remained below one thousand migrants per year from before the Second World War and well into the Cold War.