Large-scale immigration from German to the United States has not been concentrated in a few decades, like immigration from other countries, but has occurred in many different eras of American and German history. There were German communities in colonial America, and Germans were a significant proportion of all immigrants to the United States throughout the nineteenth century. More than 100,000 people emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1852 and 1952, and in many other years in between. There were fluctuations in the size of the immigration - varying with the conditions in the United States and Germany - but the flow has remained substantial for nearly two centuries. At various periods of history, the flow has been predominately immigrants, at other times refugees. Sometimes the immigrants have been predominately Catholic, sometimes predominately Protestant, and sometimes predominately Jewish. The regional origins of this emigration in Germany have also differed. The net result is German Americans have been a highly diverse group - not only by such usual indications as class, religion, or region, but also differing greatly by how many generations they have been in America.
So it is, then, that leaders of the Jewish community, leaders of the Roman Catholic community, and leaders of the Protestant community in America share roots in Germany.
