An American is a person who has U.S. citizenship or whose parents are of U.S. ancestry. The United States is a multi-racial country, with four major races: white, black, colored and Asian, accounting for 75%, 13%, 7% and 5% of the total population respectively. There are about 12 million Asians, mainly Indians (over 50%) and Chinese. The human development index is 0.902 (very high, in 2010, it ranked 4th in the world, after Australia and New Zealand).

Native Americans:

About 20,000 years ago, some safari tribes from Asia chased the herd all the way and crossed the intercontinental land bridge of today’s Bering Strait to the American continent, becoming the earliest America in history. migrant. As time went on, by the time the Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World in 1492, the native population living on what is now the continental United States was approximately 1.5 million.

Columbus mistakenly thought that San Salvador in the Bahamas was the legendary East Indies (the Indies), so he called the native Americans “Indians”.

There are currently 562 tribal nations in the United States, scattered in the 48 states of the continental United States and Alaska. The total area of ​​Indian reservations is about 22.4 million hectares. The 12 largest Indian tribes are: Cherokee 369,035, Navajo 225,298, Sioux 107,321, Chippewa 105,988 , Choctaw 86 231, Pueblo 55 330, Apache 53 330, Iroquois 52 557, Rambi ( Lumbee 50 888, Creek 45 872, Blackfoot 37 992 and Chickasaw 21 522.

European immigration:

The British were the dominant ethnic group among the early American colonizers, and English became the dominant language in the United States. But, following the British, other Europeans soon followed, among them the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, the Germans and the Swedes. A famous spokesman for the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, himself an Englishman, stated clearly in 1776: “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.” of America.) However, until 1780, Americans of British or Irish descent still accounted for three-quarters of the population.

Between 1840 and 1860, the United States ushered in the first great wave of immigration. At that time, due to poor agricultural harvests, population growth and political unrest, the whole of Europe starved to death, and about 5 million people were displaced from their homes every year. More than 750,000 people starved to death in Ireland due to potato disease. Many survivors emigrated overseas. In 1847 alone, 118,120 Irish immigrated to the United States. Today, there are approximately 39 million Americans of Irish descent.

The failure of the German Confederation’s Revolution of 1848-49 caused many Germans to emigrate overseas. During the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, the federal government also encouraged Europeans to immigrate to the United States, especially German immigrants, in order to enrich their troops. In return for military service, the federal government awarded immigrants free land. By 1865, about one-fifth of Union soldiers were wartime immigrants. Today, 22 percent of Americans have German ancestry.

Between 1820 and 70, about 200,000 European Jews from Germany and other places entered the United States. Most of these Jewish immigrants are small traders engaged in the retail industry, scattered throughout the United States. More Jewish immigration to the United States began around 1880, when they were brutally persecuted in Eastern European countries for about 12 years.

Over the next 45 years, two million Jews immigrated to the United States. These Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Austria were poor and did not understand English. Most of them lived in large cities such as New York and Chicago, and entered factories to work or engage in handicrafts and small shops.

Today, there are more than 5 million Jewish Americans, more than half of whom live in New York, California and Florida. The vast majority of Jews live in urban and suburban areas, mainly in the middle class, with high levels of education and income, and have important influence in the political, economic and cultural fields of the United States.

Unwilling Immigrants:

In the flood of immigrants pouring into North America, there was a group of people who came by force. That’s the 500,000 Africans who were sold to America as slaves between 1619 and 1808. In 1808 the United States issued a law prohibiting the importation of slaves. However, farmers continued to own slaves and their children because of the need for labor, especially in the agricultural south. Today, African Americans constitute 12.9% of the total U.S. population, with a total of 34,658,190 people (U.S. Census Bureau data as of December 7, 2001).

Latin American immigrants (Hispanics):

About 4 million Spanish-speaking Latin American immigrants flocked to the United States in the 1950s. According to the United States Census Bureau as of March 8, 2000, the Latino population living in the United States today is 27,174,300.

About half of those Hispanics are from Mexico, and the other half are from countries such as Puerto Rico, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Colombia. 36% of Hispanics live in California. Other states with larger Hispanic populations are Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida. Thousands of Cubans fled to Florida after Castro’s victory in the Cuban Revolution. The number of Cuban-Americans living in Miami is so large that the Miami Herald, the city’s largest newspaper, publishes a Spanish-language edition in addition to its English-language edition.

Asian Americans:

The Chinese were the first Asian immigrants to immigrate to the United States. As early as 1785 in the early days of the founding of the United States, three Chinese sailors, A Xing, A Chuan and A Chun, came to the United States on the “Goddess of Wisdom” sailboat. However, until the mid-19th century, the Chinese seldom heard about the United States and had no interest in immigration, because China’s relatively stable social order and natural economy allowed ordinary people to live and work in peace and contentment despite their poverty.

However, the Opium War and the aggression of Western powers since 1840 have made the Qing government, which is in trouble both at home and abroad, intensify its oppression of the people, arousing the Taiping Rebellion, and the people are desperate and desperate.

After the news of the discovery of gold mines in California in 1848 spread to coastal areas such as Fujian and Guangdong in China, more Chinese began to embark on the road of survival across the Pacific Ocean and living abroad. In 1849, there were 791 Chinese who entered San Francisco, which increased to 4,025 in 1850. By 1873, the number of Chinese who immigrated to the United States had reached about 150,000.