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The modest levels of colonial immigration were dwarfed by the movements of the nineteenth century. From 1815 to the Civil War, five million people immigrated to the United States. About one-half the number came from England and about 40 percent of the total came from Ireland. Another ten million came between 1865 and 1890, mostly from northwestern Europe. Finally about fifteen million arrived between 1890 and 1914 when the outbreak of war in Europe temporarily arrested the flow. The later group brought many more southern and eastern Europeans - Poles, Jews, Slovaks, Italians, and Greeks - than had ever come before. The American economy produced a steady demand for unskilled and skilled workers and farmers throughout much of the nineteenth century. After the 1880s, however, this demand was almost exclusively for unskilled workers to fill the growing number of factory jobs. The impact of this growing demand was felt more heavily in areas of Europe that were undergoing substantial economic changes by the 1880s. Dislocated for the land, unsure of whether to remain in the United States, and possessing few skills, southern and eastern Europeans moved into industrial work in pursuit of a livelihood. Five major factors in nineteenth-century Europe led to increases in immigration: a dramatic population increase, the spread of commercial agriculture, the rise of the factory system, the proliferation of inexpensive means of transportation such as steamships and railroads, and outbreaks of religious intolerance. These factors did not make an impact everywhere at once, but where they did, especially in fertile agricultural regions, immigration to America became a distinct possibility.
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