Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Blaðsíða 65

SWEDISH EMIGRATION TO AMERICA
55
It will be seen that emigration culminated during the 1880’s.
In some of the years in question it reached unprecedented peaks;
thus the registered emigration in 1887 was 51,000, in 1882 and
1888 it was 50,000, and in 1881 46,000. This means that about
10 per 1000 of the whole population of the country emigrated
during these years. Other years with exceptionally high emigration
figures — between 9 and 10 per 1000 — were 1892, 1869, and
1880.
The great increase of emigration after the middle of the i9th
century resulted, in its turn, in an increase of immigration, owing
to the fact that many immigrants ultimately returned to their
country of origin. From having previously only amounted to
one or two thousand a year, the immigration figure now rose to
about 8,000 in the years about the turn of the century. Even
after the cessation of large-scale emigration, the number of return-
ing emigrants remained large. During the 1920’s e. g., there were
62,200 immigrants, 29,300 of whom came from North America,
The full implications of this flow of emigrants for the Swe-
dish population cannot be clearly realized unless one examines
what population-groups were especially represented among the
emigrants. In the first place it should be noted that the majority
of the emigrants (about 60 per cent.) were men. The character
of the emigration shows considerable variations in the different
periods. Thus, during the first part of the period of large-scale
emigration a good third of the people who left Sweden con-
stituted family groups (married couples with their children),
but this proportion gradually fell to about one fourth. Professor
Sundbárg remarks: “This shows how greatly the character of the
emigration is modified in the course of time. At first, families
usually went together, once they had made up their minds to
take the plunge. Nowadays, however, the bulk of the emigrants
are young people who have no family ties as yet, and who go
to seek their fortune abroad on their own.”
One distinctive feature of the emigration was that most of
the people who left Sweden belonged to the younger, productive
age-groups. Of those who emigrated during the latter half of
the i9th century, 70 per cent. were between the ages of 15 and
35- While the relative figure for the recorded emigration of