Waves of Hungarian Immigration to the United States

This thesis wishes to give an introduction about important concepts in connection with the migration movement, like: Immigration, Americanization and the Question of Identity mirrored in the three main migration trends from Hungary to the United States. One of the goals of the thesis is also to show the differences between the three trends on the basis of historical background, reasons of migration, character, stratification of the emigrants and several other factors. The central issue of the thesis is the detailed analysis of the third trend. This part tries to point out the gray areas in the available research studies. The statistical data and therefore the works of the researchers are sometimes contradictory. To several questions researchers have not been able to find any reliable explanations up to now. Historians have not managed to find any well established explanations to the national composition of the emigrants either. The question, whether the nationality problems played any role in this phenomenon is still unclarified. However, we can get a relatively good picture about the opportunities and living conditions of the Hungarian immigrants in the USA with the help of the contemporary newspapers and almanacs. Hungarian-American studies served as the basis of this thesis. These studies had a slow and weak start in the late 19th century and made great strides during the 1960s and the 1970s in collecting and preserving the readily vanishing sources and information dealing with the HungarianAmerican past. The studies published up to now do not constitute the final word in the field of the History of the Hungarian-Americans, but do fill a gap and encourage other scholars to produce even more comprehensive works on Hungarian past and culture in the United States.