European emigration

[5] Most European emigrants to the New World came from mainly Italy, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, and Portugal, as well as France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Armenia, Greece, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine.

In Archaic Greece, trading and colonizing activities of the Greek tribes from the Black Sea, Southern Italy (the so-called "Magna Graecia") and Asia Minor propagated Greek culture, religion and language around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins.

[6] Alexander the Great's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire marked the beginning of the Hellenistic period, which was characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization in Asia and Africa; the Greek ruling classes established their presence in Egypt, southwest Asia, and Northwest India.

[7] Many Greeks migrated to the new Hellenistic cities founded in Alexander's wake, as geographically dispersed as Uzbekistan[8] and Kuwait.

[9] The European continent has been a central part of a complex migration system, which included swaths of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia Minor well before the modern era.

[3] About 200,000 Spaniards settled in their American provinces prior to 1600, a small settlement compared to the 3 to 4 million Amerindians who lived in Spanish territory in the Americas.

However, with the discovery of numerous highly productive gold mines in the Minas Gerais region, the Portuguese emigration to Brazil increased by fivefold.

During the 18th century hundreds of thousands left for the Portuguese Colony of Brazil, despite efforts by the crown to place severe restrictions on emigration.

[14] In the 18th century, thanks to the gold rush, the capital of the province of Minas Gerais, the town of Vila Rica (today, Ouro Preto) became for a time one of the most populous cities in the New World.

This massive influx of Portuguese immigration and influence created a city which remains to this day, one of the best examples of 18th century European architecture in the Americas.

[22] There was mass European emigration to the Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in the 19th and 20th centuries, as a result of a dramatic demographic transition in 19th-century Europe, subsequent wars and political changes on the continent.

The proportion of foreigners in Brazil peaked in 1920, at just 7 percent or 2 million people, mostly Italians, Portuguese, Germans and Spaniards.

[26] Other countries that received a more modest immigration flow (accounting for less than 10 percent of total European emigration to Latin America) were: Mexico (226,000), Colombia (126,000), Puerto Rico (62,000), Peru (30,000), and Paraguay (21,000).

[26][25] After the Age of Discovery, different ethnic European communities began to emigrate out of Europe with particular concentrations in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico where they came to constitute a European-descended majority population.

[24][28][29][30] It is important to note, however, that these statistics rely on identification with a European ethnic group in censuses, and as such are subjective (especially in the case of mixed origins).

Nations and regions outside Europe with significant populations:[31] In the first Canadian census in 1871, 98.5% chose a European origin with it slightly decreasing to 96.3% declared in 1971.

[35] At the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, 80.7% of the American people self-identified as White, where it remained above that level, even reaching as high as 90% prior to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Britannica estimates that around three-fifths are Mestizo, which includes people with some European ancestry, while White Mexicans are the largest part of the remainder.

A summary published by the Latin American Public Opinion Project has described this as more accurate than self-identification particularly, where the different discourses that exist in regards to national identity have rendered previous attempts to estimate ethnic groups unreliable.

[44][45] Cubans of European origin (predominantly Spanish) reached its highest proportion during the early to mid twentieth century.

In Peru the official 2017 census, 5.9% or (1.3 mil) 1,336,931 people 12 years of age and above self-identified their ancestors as White or of European descent.

[71] As of 2016, the majority of Australians of European descent are of English (36.1%), Irish (11.0%), Scottish (9.3%), Italian (4.6%), German (4.5%), Greek (1.8%) and Dutch (1.6%) ancestries.