History of Wisconsin Immigration

Wisconsin was, for a stretch of the nineteenth century, the most foreign-born state in the United States. At its first federal census as a state, in 1850, more than a third of everyone living within its borders had been born abroad, nearly four times the national rate.^[1] Over the following seventy years the state absorbed Germans, Norwegians, Poles, Belgians, Swiss, Danes, Dutch, Czechs, Cornish, Irish and Icelanders in numbers that reshaped its map, its politics and its language, and then, after the First World War and the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, stopped receiving them almost entirely.

This article traces that settlement era decade by decade: the numbers, the successive waves and where each landed, and what made Wisconsin structurally unlike the eastern port cities that absorbed the same migrations. The short answer is that Wisconsin sold immigrants land rather than wages, ran a government recruiting office in New York and printed pamphlets in four languages, and let non-citizen men vote after one year of residence, a combination that produced single-nationality townships whose institutions outlasted their urban equivalents by two generations.

1. The numbers

1.1 Foreign-born population by census, 1850–1960

Wisconsin entered the Union in 1848. At the 1850 census it recorded a foreign-born share of 36.2 percent, among the highest ever measured for any U.S. state.^[1] The absolute number of foreign-born residents kept climbing for another forty years even as the percentage began to slip, because native-born children were being produced faster than immigrants were arriving. The count peaked in 1890 at 518,989.^[3] After the restriction acts of the 1920s the first generation simply aged out, and by 1960 the foreign-born population had fallen to a third of its peak.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau historical nativity series;^[1][2] UW–Madison Applied Population Laboratory.^[3] All figures are decennial census counts.

1.2 Wisconsin against the nation

Charted side by side, the gap is the whole story. Wisconsin sits enormously above the national figure for nine consecutive censuses, by a factor of nearly four in 1850 and still by half again in 1910, then converges with it in the 1940s and slips below it for the first time in 1950.

1.3 Where they came from

At the 1900 census, near the top of the curve, and the last census before the Polish and Southern European surge reshaped the national picture, Wisconsin’s foreign-born population was overwhelmingly German and Northern European. Germany alone accounted for 47 percent of all foreign-born residents, roughly double its 25.5 percent share of the national foreign-born population.^[5]

Source: 1900 U.S. Census, as compiled from IPUMS microdata.^[5] “Poland” was not a sovereign state in 1900; many people counted here as German, Russian, or Austrian subjects were ethnically Polish, so the Polish figure is a substantial undercount of the Polish-speaking population.

Thirty years later the mix had shifted, but only within Europe. The 1930 census still recorded 128,269 Wisconsin residents born in Germany, 42,359 born in Poland, now a sovereign state, which is why the count quadrupled, 34,391 born in Norway, and just 3,473 born in the Irish Free State.^[6]

2. The waves

2.1 1820s–1844: lead miners and the first colonies

The first substantial foreign-born population in what would become Wisconsin was not agricultural but industrial, and it arrived before statehood. Cornish hard-rock miners came to the lead district of the southwest, Mineral Point, Shullsburg, Dodgeville, Platteville, in the 1830s, bringing shaft-mining technique from Cornwall and building the limestone rowhouses that still line Shake Rag Street in Mineral Point. Irish labourers followed the same mineral rush and the canal and railroad work that came with it.

Two colonising events in 1839 set the template for everything after:

• Freistadt, Ozaukee County (1839). Twenty “Old Lutheran” families from eastern Pomerania, refugees from the Prussian state’s forced union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches, founded the first organised German settlement in Wisconsin.^[7] They built the first Lutheran church in Wisconsin in 1840. Trinity Lutheran, the congregation they founded, remains to this day the only church in Freistadt, and many current residents descend from the original twenty families.^[8]
• The Muskego Settlement (1839). John Nielsen Luraas led roughly forty emigrants from Telemark to land near Lake Muskego in what is now Racine and Waukesha counties, the first Norwegian colony in Wisconsin.^[9] Land agents from Muskego soon located better ground to the west, and in the 1840s several hundred Norwegians moved to the Koshkonong prairie in eastern Dane County (Stoughton, Cambridge, Deerfield, Cottage Grove). Koshkonong became the largest Norwegian-American community in the United States.^[10]

2.2 1845–1860: the flood

In fifteen years Wisconsin’s population went from roughly 155,000 to 775,881, and its foreign-born population from under 40,000 to nearly 277,000. This is the densest period of immigrant settlement in the state’s history and it produced most of the ethnic geography still visible today.

The Germans

German arrivals came in overlapping streams: religious dissenters in the late 1830s and 1840s; economically displaced smallholders from the southwest German states through the 1840s and 1850s; and, after the failed revolutions of 1848, the politically exiled liberals known as the Forty-Eighters, who supplied Wisconsin with a disproportionate share of its editors, teachers, gymnastic-society founders and freethinkers. The immigration of 1854 was the largest single year in the state’s history; contemporary estimates put German arrivals to Wisconsin over May, June and July of that year at no fewer than 16,000.^[11]

The chartered colonies

Several Wisconsin settlements were not organic chain migrations at all but corporate or governmental projects:

• New Glarus (1845). After years of crop failure left the Swiss canton of Glarus in poverty, the cantonal government treated emigration as public policy. Its Emigration Society sent Nicholas Dürst and Fridolin Streiff to America to buy land; on 17 July 1845 they purchased 1,200 acres on the Little Sugar River in Green County. They were joined in August by 108 settlers. 193 people had embarked from Switzerland that April, only 140 had been expected, but “emigration fever” added more than fifty.^[12][13] The village organised in 1850; the first cheese factory opened in 1870, founding an industry.
• The Dutch Catholic settlements (1848). Little Chute, Hollandtown and Oostburg in the Fox River valley and along Lake Michigan, seeded by Father Theodore van den Broek’s recruiting in Noord-Brabant.
• The Belgian settlement (from 1853). The first Belgian families arrived in 1853 and settled at what is now Champion in Brown County. Between 1853 and 1857 thousands of Walloons followed into an area of roughly 100 square miles across Door, Kewaunee and Brown counties. By 1860 more than 4,600 Belgian immigrants lived in Wisconsin.^[14][15] It became, and remains, the largest rural Belgian-American settlement in the United States, marked by village names transplanted whole (Brussels, Namur, Rosiere, Luxemburg), a surviving Walloon patois, a distinctive brick-and-stone vernacular architecture, the kermis harvest festival, and foods with no American analogue (booyah, trippe, jutt).
• The Danes of Racine County (from the late 1830s, mass arrival after 1850). Thousands of Danes settled in Racine drawn by factory work. By 1920 Racine could plausibly call itself the most Danish city outside Denmark, with a Danish minority of 13.7 percent.^[16] The Dania Society, founded in 1867 to promote Danish-language study, ran a hall, library, choir and dramatic club. The kringle survives as the state pastry.

The state as recruiter

Wisconsin did not passively receive this flood. In 1852 the legislature created a Commission of Emigration and appointed the Dutch-born Gysbert Van Steenwyck as commissioner. He opened for business in New York City on 18 May 1852, an agent of the state government stationed at the arrival port, intercepting immigrants before they chose a destination.^[11][17] The commission published promotional pamphlets in German, Norwegian, Dutch and English, distributed them through Europe and the eastern ports, placed newspaper advertisements, and held face-to-face conferences with newly landed emigrants. The office ran 1852–1855; a successor Board of Immigration issued pamphlets from 1867 into the 1890s.^[18]

2.3 1865–1914: the peak and the second sources

The postbellum decades brought the largest absolute numbers. The 1870 census found that more than a third of the state’s million-plus residents had been born overseas: about 16 percent of the total population from Germany, 8 percent from the British Isles, 5 percent from Scandinavia, and the balance from elsewhere in Europe or Canada.^[19]

German dominance crested and then began a slow statistical retreat that had nothing to do with the German community shrinking:

Source: LaVern J. Rippley, Wisconsin’s German-Americans: From Ethnic Identity to Assimilation, Yearbook of German-American Studies.^[6] The German-born share halved between 1890 and 1910 while German stock barely moved, the first generation was aging out and being replaced by an American-born second generation, not by other ethnicities.

In Milwaukee the numbers were sharper still. German-born residents made up 36.2 percent of the city in 1850, 31.5 percent in 1870, 26.8 percent in 1890 and 17.3 percent in 1910; by 1920 nearly half of all Milwaukeeans reported German heritage through themselves or their parents. Outside the city, German-born people were 34 percent of Ozaukee County, 28 percent of Washington County and 16 percent of Waukesha County as early as 1870.^[20]

New sources within Europe

• Poles. Wisconsin’s Poles came overwhelmingly not from independent Poland, there was none, but from the German-ruled provinces of Posen (Poznań) and Silesia and from the Baltic coast.^[21] They filled Milwaukee’s South Side around St. Stanislaus, the city’s first Polish Catholic parish (founded 1866), and built a second major rural concentration around Stevens Point in Portage County. A distinct Kashubian fishing community settled Jones Island in Milwaukee harbour beginning in 1870; by the 1890s the island was a village of roughly two thousand people, two-thirds of them Kashubes, most originating from the Hel Peninsula and the Puck area north of Gdańsk.^[22][23] The community, which held no legal title to the land, was cleared by the city between the 1910s and 1940s for harbour works.
• Finns and Swedes moved into the “Cutover” the pine counties of the far north stripped by the logging industry and then sold, often deceptively, as farmland.
• Icelanders settled Washington Island in Door County beginning in 1870, when a Dane named W. F. Wickman persuaded four young Icelandic bachelors from Eyrarbakki to try Lake Michigan fishing. They left Iceland on 12 May 1870 and reached Milwaukee on 27 June.^[24][25] It is the second-oldest Icelandic settlement in North America, Spanish Fork, Utah (1854) is older, but the one from which the wider North American Icelandic emigration movement actually propagated, through letters home.
• Czechs (Bohemians) concentrated in Manitowoc, Kewaunee and Racine counties; 14,145 Bohemian-born residents were counted in 1900.

2.4 1917–1930s: the shutdown

Wisconsin’s European era ended in two blows delivered five years apart.

The First World War

Nine of Wisconsin’s eleven U.S. representatives voted against the declaration of war. Combined with Senator Robert La Follette’s opposition, a substantial Socialist vote that had not backed Wilson, and the largest German-American population of any state, this earned Wisconsin a national reputation: by the summer of 1917 newspaper editors elsewhere were calling it a “traitor state.”^[26] The response, from both outside and from self-appointed loyalists inside, was swift and effective. German books were burned in Wisconsin streets. Towns stopped teaching German. Anyone with a German surname became a target of suspicion.

The collapse of German-language public life was close to total, and it is best measured in a single statistic from Milwaukee: enrolment in German-language instruction fell from 30,000 students in 1916 to 200 in 1919.^[20][27] German-language newspapers folded through the 1920s, West Bend’s in 1917, Port Washington’s in 1928. The Pabst Theater staged its last German-language production in 1931.

The quota acts

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 capped arrivals by national origin and effectively closed the trans-Atlantic pipeline. Wisconsin’s foreign-born population, 460,128 in 1920, fell by 72,000 over the next decade and by another 99,000 in the decade after that.

Two replacement flows

The labour demand did not disappear; it was met from two other directions.

• Mexican workers. Milwaukee’s first Mexican colonia formed in 1920, when roughly one hundred workers, Los Primeros, were recruited from central Mexico to the Pfister & Vogel tannery on South 6th Street. They had not been told they were being brought in to break a strike by unionised workers of European descent; the strikers’ reaction was angry enough that the company housed its new employees inside the factory.^[28] Others were recruited to the sugar-beet fields of the Fox Valley near Green Bay, Oshkosh and Fond du Lac; by the late 1920s Mexican betabeleros were three-fifths of the migrant sugar-beet labour force in the upper Midwest. Fewer than 50 Mexican-born people lived in Milwaukee in 1910; by 1927 the number passed 3,000 and by 1930 reached as many as 7,000. Then the Depression: state and federal officials rounded up Mexicans for “repatriation” regardless of citizenship, and by 1933 the city’s Mexican population had been cut to about 1,500.^[28][29]
• The Great Migration. Internal movement, not immigration, but the single largest demographic transformation of twentieth-century Wisconsin. Milwaukee’s Black population was 8,821 in 1940, 21,772 in 1950, more than 62,000 in 1960 and more than 105,000 in 1970, rising from 1.3 percent of the city to 14.7 percent in thirty years.^[30] Southern-born Black migrants filled the industrial jobs that had once been the destination of German and Polish arrivals, and encountered a housing market that confined them to a narrow corridor, the origin of Milwaukee’s long standing as one of the most residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the country.

3. What made Wisconsin different

High immigrant density alone was not unusual in the nineteenth century, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California all had large foreign-born populations. Four structural features set Wisconsin apart.

3.1 Land, not wages

This is the single largest difference. New York, Boston and Chicago absorbed immigrants as wage labour into an existing urban economy; the immigrant was a tenant and an employee, and both roles created immediate pressure to assimilate, you cannot bargain with a foreman in Plattdeutsch. Wisconsin, arriving at statehood exactly when the federal land office was disposing of the territory, absorbed immigrants as purchasers of land. A German or Norwegian family landing in 1850 with modest savings could expect to own a farm within a few years.

Property ownership removed the economic compulsion to Anglicise. A farmer who owns his land deals with his neighbours, his church and his co-operative creamery, and if his neighbours, pastor and creamery are all Pomeranian, he need not conduct much business in English at all. It is not an accident that German remained a functioning community language in parts of Wisconsin into the 1940s.

3.2 The state recruited, and paid for it

Wisconsin ran what amounted to a national marketing campaign for itself: a salaried Commissioner of Emigration posted in New York from 1852, multilingual pamphlets distributed in Europe and at the ports, newspaper advertising, and direct solicitation of newly landed emigrants.^[11][17] The later Board of Immigration continued issuing promotional literature from 1867 to 1896.^[18] Railroads and land companies ran parallel campaigns. Immigrants did not merely drift to Wisconsin; they were sold on it, in their own languages, by agents of the state.

3.3 An extraordinary franchise

Wisconsin’s 1848 constitution extended the vote, in local, state and federal elections, to “white persons of foreign birth who shall have declared their intention to become citizens,” after only one year’s residence in the state.^[33][34] A German liberal who landed in New York in the spring of 1852, filed a declaration of intent, and moved to Milwaukee could be voting for a congressman by the spring of 1853, years before naturalisation.

This “declarant alien” formula was consciously a recruiting device, and it worked well enough that it became a model: Congress approved versions of it for numerous western territories, and by the mid-nineteenth century some twenty-two states and territories permitted non-citizen voting in some form. Wisconsin repealed the provision by constitutional amendment in 1908, effective 1912.^[33] But for sixty years it meant that immigrant communities in Wisconsin had political weight from almost the moment they arrived, which is why Wisconsin politicians took German and Norwegian opinion so seriously, and why the events described in §4 played out as they did.

3.4 Chain migration produced whole townships, not neighbourhoods

In the port cities, chain migration produced ethnic blocks inside a mixed metropolis, Kleindeutschland, the North End, Pilsen. In rural Wisconsin, because settlers wrote home and their home villages followed them, chain migration produced entire civil towns of a single nationality and often a single religious confession: self-contained units with their own church, parochial school, newspaper, mutual insurance society, tavern and language.

The scale of the unit matters enormously for how long ethnicity survives. A neighbourhood is porous and gets rezoned, redeveloped and out-migrated within two generations. A township is a legal entity with fixed boundaries whose land passes by inheritance within families. Wisconsin’s ethnic institutions therefore routinely lasted three and four generations where their urban equivalents lasted two.

4. The politics of an immigrant state

4.1 The Bennett Law and the revolt of 1890

In April 1889 Governor William D. Hoard signed the Bennett Law, which required that major subjects be taught in English in every public and private elementary and high school in Wisconsin.^[35][36] On its face a school-attendance and child-labour reform, it struck directly at the two largest parochial school networks in the state, the German Catholic system and the German Lutheran systems of the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods, plus a handful of Norwegian Lutheran schools. Their classroom language was German; compliance meant replacing their teachers.

The reaction was one of the sharpest ethnic-political mobilisations in American state history. By June 1890 both Lutheran synods had formally denounced the law and the German Catholic hierarchy had fallen in behind them, an alliance between confessional rivals who agreed on nothing else. Democrats took up the cause, and in November 1890 Hoard and the Republicans were turned out after a single term; George W. Peck became governor. The Bennett Law was repealed the following session.

The episode is the clearest demonstration of what declarant-alien suffrage and township-scale settlement produced in combination: an immigrant electorate capable of removing a sitting governor over a language question.

4.2 Victor Berger and Milwaukee socialism

Victor L. Berger (1860–1929) was born in Nieder-Rehbach, Austria-Hungary, educated in Vienna and Budapest, and emigrated to the United States in 1878, becoming a teacher in Milwaukee. In 1892 he bought a German-language newspaper and renamed it Wisconsin Vorwärts; in 1898 he and Eugene Debs founded the Social Democratic Party, which became the Socialist Party of America in 1901. In 1910 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin’s 5th district, the first Socialist ever to sit in Congress, serving from 1911.^[37][38]

Milwaukee’s “sewer socialism” a municipal programme focused on public health, sanitation, parks and honest administration rather than doctrinal purity, was a direct product of German artisan and labour culture transplanted whole: the trade unions, the singing societies, the Turner gymnastic halls, the German-language press. It gave Milwaukee three Socialist mayors and nearly forty years of Socialist city government across the twentieth century. No comparable movement took hold anywhere else in the United States, and the reason is demographic.

5. The freeze, and why 1900 is still legible

Here is the mechanism that makes Wisconsin’s settlement history unusually visible on the ground.

In most of the states that received heavy nineteenth-century immigration, later arrivals kept coming, and each new cohort partially overwrote the last. Their ethnic geography is a palimpsest: the 1900 layer is still there, but it has been written over several times.

Wisconsin’s immigration stopped around 1920. There was no overwriting layer. The 1900 ethnic map, which counties are German, which are Norwegian, which are Belgian or Polish or Czech, is therefore still substantially the map of the state today, four to six generations later. What survives is not nostalgia but institutional continuity: the same congregations in the same buildings, the same family names on the same land, the same festivals on the same calendar.

The measurable residue:

• Ancestry. German ancestry is claimed by roughly 37–40 percent of Wisconsin residents depending on the survey year and method, the highest or second-highest share of any state, in perennial competition with North Dakota. Irish (≈10%), Polish (≈9%) and Norwegian (≈7%) follow.^[4][39]
• Language. German is still among the most commonly spoken non-English languages in Wisconsin homes, in about 27,067 households.^[40] Very few of those speakers are immigrants; this is a heritage language that never fully died in the rural east and north.
• Landscape and institutions. The Belgian brick farmhouses and roadside chapels of southern Door County; the Norwegian log construction preserved at Old World Wisconsin; the Kermis and the Syttende Mai; the Swiss cheese industry founded at New Glarus in 1870; Racine’s kringle; the Friday fish fry, which is a Catholic-German-Polish observance turned into a statewide secular institution; the Turner halls; the surviving Lutheran and Catholic parochial school networks that the Bennett Law failed to break.

6. See also

• Wisconsin Historical Society, Immigration in the 19th Century
• Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, UW–Madison
• Encyclopedia of Milwaukee
• UW–Madison Applied Population Laboratory
• Walloons in Wisconsin
• Bennett Law
• New Glarus Historical Society / Swiss Historical Village

7. References

1. U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000, Working Paper No. 81 (2006). census.gov
2. U.S. Census Bureau, “Foreign-Born Population in the United States Changed Significantly in Both Numbers and Countries of Origin” (July 2026). census.gov
3. UW–Madison Applied Population Laboratory, “The Changing Faces of Wisconsin’s Foreign-Born Residents.” apl.wisc.edu
4. UW–Madison Applied Population Laboratory, “Wisconsin’s Foreign-Born Population” (data brief). apl.wisc.edu
5. Stacker, “What Wisconsin’s immigrant population looked like in 1900” (1900 U.S. Census / IPUMS). stacker.com
6. LaVern J. Rippley, “Wisconsin’s German-Americans: From Ethnic Identity to Assimilation,” Yearbook of German-American Studies. journals.ku.edu
7. Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, “A New Home” (Freistadt, 1839). mki.wisc.edu
8. Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, Freistadt, Historical Society. trinitymequon.org; Ozaukee County, “Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church – Freistadt.” ozaukeecounty.gov
9. “Muskego Settlement, Wisconsin,” Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
10. “Koshkonong Settlement,” Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
11. Wisconsin Historical Society, “Immigration in the 19th Century.” wisconsinhistory.org
12. New Glarus Historical Society, “New Glarus Historical Timeline.” swisshistoricalvillage.org
13. UW–Madison, WI 101, “Swiss Immigration to New Glarus.” wi101.wisc.edu
14. “Walloons in Wisconsin,” Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
15. Historical Marker Database, “Belgian Settlement in Wisconsin.” hmdb.org
16. “Danish Immigration to Racine County, Wisconsin,” The Bridge (BYU ScholarsArchive). scholarsarchive.byu.edu
17. UW–Madison Libraries Digital Collections, The Wisconsin Office of Emigration, 1852–1855, and Its Impact on German Immigration to the State. search.library.wisc.edu
18. Wisconsin Historical Society, “Wisconsin Board of Immigration pamphlets, 1867–1896,” Turning Points in Wisconsin History. wisconsinhistory.org
19. Wisconsin Historical Society, “Wisconsin 19th-Century Immigration and Growth.” wisconsinhistory.org
20. Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, “Germans.” emke.uwm.edu
21. Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, “Poles.” emke.uwm.edu
22. Emigration Museum in Gdynia, “Kashubians of Jones Island, Milwaukee: then and now.” polska1.pl
23. Wisconsin Life, “The Kaszubs of Jones Island.” wisconsinlife.org
24. Door County Pulse, “Icelandic Emigration to Washington Island.” doorcountypulse.com
25. Icelandic Roots, “Icelandic Settlement on Washington Island, Wisconsin.” icelandicroots.com
26. Milwaukee Independent, “WWI Remembered: Wisconsin seen as a ‘Traitor State’ gave rise to ‘Hyper-Patriots’.” milwaukeeindependent.com
27. Max Kade Institute, “World War I and the German Language in America.” language.mki.wisc.edu
28. Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, “Mexicans.” emke.uwm.edu
29. Wisconsin Department of Health Services, “Hispanic/Latinos in Wisconsin: History.” dhs.wisconsin.gov
30. Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, “African Americans.” emke.uwm.edu
31. Wisconsin Department of Health Services, “Asian Americans in Wisconsin: History.” dhs.wisconsin.gov
32. Ron Hayduk, “Immigrant Voting, Wisconsin.” ronhayduk.com
33. Wisconsin Constitution, Article III, §1 (Suffrage), annotated. 50constitutions.org
34. “Bennett Law,” Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
35. Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, “Bennett Law.” emke.uwm.edu
36. U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Representative Victor Berger of Wisconsin, the First Socialist Member of Congress.” history.house.gov
37. UW–Madison, WI 101, “Victor Berger and the Sewer Socialists.” wi101.wisc.edu
38. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Wisconsin: People.” britannica.com
39. Data USA, “Wisconsin” (language spoken at home). datausa.io

All population figures are decennial U.S. census counts unless otherwise noted. Ancestry and language figures are American Community Survey estimates and carry margins of error.