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White Americans think of themselves as the children of immigrants. Our calculations from the General Social Survey (GSS) (Davis and Smith 1992) show that when white American adults are asked "What country or part of the world did your ancestors come from?" 92 percent can name a specific country or part of the world, and 89.4 percent of those name a European country. The modal responses among the remainder are "American Indian" (which raises questions about the "race" item), followed by "Mexico" and "French Canada." The 1980 Census question yielded similar results; only 8 percent of whites failed to mention a European country when asked the subjective ancestry question (Lieberson and Waters 1988; Farley 1991).(1)
Although nearly all white Americans are descendants of Europeans, very few are actually the children of immigrants; most non-Latino whites are natives with native parents. For most Americans, the family lines to Europe stretch back at least two generations. For groups that started coming to North America before 1800, the number of current descendants far exceeds the total number of immigrants. For example, the 1980 Census enumerated over 40 million Irish Americans -- 18 percent of the U.S. population (Lieberson and Waters 1988:table 2.1).(2) Immigration records indicate that 4.1 million immigrants came from Ireland between 1820 and 1920 (Blessing 1985). Add to that the 400,000 Irish-origin residents already present in 1790 (not all of whom were immigrants) and the 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants from Ireland since 1920 and you have an Irish immigrant base of 4.7 to 4.8 million people. The 40 million people who identified themselves as native-born Irish Americans in the 1980 census constitute an amazing nine-fold increase of current stock over the original source of 4.5 million immigrants (not counting the 200,000 Irish-born American residents and naturalized citizens). A similar increase could be shown for other groups that immigrated early, such as the British and the Germans. Even groups that first arrived significantly later, such as the Italians and Poles, could have high ratios of current ethnic population to number of immigrants because their fertility during their first generation in the United States was as high as the fertility of the Irish and British during colonial times (Morgan, Watkins, and Ewbank 1993).
Nearly half of the white...