Italian Americans are an ethnic group consisting of Americans who have ancestry from Italy. Italian Americans are the seventh largest Census-reported ethnic group in the United States .About 5.5 million Italians immigrated to the United States from 1820 to 2004. By 1870, there were less than 25,000 Italian immigrants in America, many of them Northern Italian refugees from the wars that accompanied the Risorgimento—the struggle for Italian unification and independence from foreign rule. Immigration began to increase during the 1870s, when more than twice as many Italians immigrated than during the five previous decades combined . The 1870s were followed by the greatest surge of immigration, which occurred between 1880 and 1914 and brought more than 4 million Italians to the United States, the great majority being from Southern Italy and Sicily, with most having agrarian backgrounds. This period of large scale immigration ended abruptly with the onset of the First World War in 1914 and, except for one year , never fully resumed. Further immigration was greatly limited by several laws Congress passed in the 1920s.Approximately 84% of the Italian immigrants came from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This was the poorest and least developed part of Italy, still largely rural and agricultural, where much of the populace had been impoverished by centuries of foreign misrule, and an oppressive taxation system imposed after Italian unification in 1861. After unification, the Italian government initially encouraged emigration to relieve economic pressures in the South. After the American Civil War, which resulted in over a half million killed or wounded, immigrant workers were recruited from Italy and elsewhere to fill the labor shortage caused by the war. In the United States, most Italians began their new lives as manual laborers in Eastern cities, mining camps and in agriculture. The descendants of the Italian immigrants gradually rose from a lower economic class in the first generation to a level comparable to the national average by 1970. The Italian community has often been characterized by strong ties to family, the Roman Catholic Church, fraternal organizations, and political parties.
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