Swedish emigration to North America

During the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden for the United States. The main pull was the availability of low cost, high quality farm land in the upper Midwest (the area from Illinois to Montana), and high paying jobs in mechanical industries and factories in Chicago, Minneapolis, Worcester and many smaller cities. Religious freedom was also a pull factor for some. Most migration was of the chain form, with early settlers giving reports and recommendations (and travel money) to relatives and friends in Sweden, who followed the same route to new homes. A major push factor inside Sweden was population growth and the growing shortage of good farm lands. Additional factors in the earliest stages of emigration included crop failures, the lack of industrial jobs in urban Sweden, and for some the wish to escape the authority of an established state church. After 1870, transatlantic fares were cheap. By the 1880s, American railroads had agents in Sweden who offered package deals on one-way tickets for entire families. The railroad would ship the family, their house furnishings and farm tools, and provide a financial deal to spread out payments for the farm over a period of years.

Swedish migration peaked 1870-1900. By 1890, the U.S. census reported a Swedish-American population of nearly 800,000. Many of the immigrants became classic pioneers, clearing and cultivating the prairies of the Great Plains, while others remained in the cities, particularly Chicago. Single young women usually went straight from agricultural work in the Swedish countryside to jobs as housemaids. Many established Swedish Americans visited the old country in the later 19th century, their narratives illustrating the difference in customs and manners. Some made the journey with the intention of spending their declining years in Sweden.

After a dip in the 1890s, emigration rose again, causing national alarm in Sweden. At this time, Sweden's economy had developed substantially, but the higher wages prevailing in the United States retained their attractiveness. A broad-based parliamentary emigration commission was instituted in 1907. It recommended social and economic reform in order to reduce emigration by "bringing the best sides of America to Sweden". The commission's major proposals were rapidly implemented: universal male suffrage, better housing, general economic development, and broader popular education, measures which also can be attributed to numerous other factors. The effect of these measures on migration is hard to assess, as World War I (1914–1918) broke out the year after the commission published its last volume, reducing emigration to a mere trickle. From the mid-1920s, there was no longer a Swedish mass emigration.

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