ABSTRACT
More than twenty-nine million Italians left their homeland in the years between 1860 and 2011. Of these, 5,800,706 came to the United States between 1876 and 2005, and over 4.5 million (4,668,665) arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1920. This chapter explores the reasons that inspired so many Italians to leave Italy in the decades after their country’s Unification in 1860–61 and before the immigration quotas that the United States imposed in the 1920s. Economic hardship is usually cited, and of course it played the major role, but other notable factors that encouraged Italians to leave their country should not be overlooked. These other factors included an older tradition of mobility and persecution for political reasons.
