ABSTRACT
Slovenia has been a land of emigration throughout its history. Nowadays its emigrants can be placed, for practical purposes, in one of the following four categories: political, economic, professional and personal.1 Political emigration is the oldest of all, its roots reaching back into the seventeenth century, the era of merciless Catholic persecution of Protestants. The first big wave of political emigration, however, came after the Second World War, after the Communist regime had established itself in the country. Economic emigration has been greatest of all. Between the years 1880 and 1914 alone, 300,000 Slovene people emigrated-a number which, at that time, represented one third of Slovenia’s natural increase of population. Professional emigration, relatively small in scale, was represented mainly by the Catholic missionaries, especially to the territories of the present-day United States and Canada, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Finally, so-called personal emigration (people who emigrated for various personal reasons) has not been limited to a particular time and has consisted mainly of emigrants’ families.
