I hope you were joking, the immigration to America didn’t even start until the mid 1800s, before that we used to get in about 6,000 a year of our people.
America was not a nation of immigrants.
Yes, of course I was being sarcastic. America being a nation of immigrants is a meaningless truism. Of course we are, but so what? It assumes that all immigrants are equal, regardless of who they were (are), why or when they came here, etc. That’s why I included it as satire. But obviously everyone’s who was born here had ancestors that came from somewhere else, but again, so what?
As for your statistics, what’s your source? The best I could find was Wikipedia. While there certainly was a spike as the 19th century went on, you numbers seem low. Also the borders were so large and porous there must have been a lot of unrecorded immigration.
“Based on available records, immigration totaled 8,385 in 1820, with immigration totals gradually increasing to 23,322 by the year 1830; for the 1820s decade immigration more than doubled to 143,000. Between 1831 and 1840, immigration more than quadrupled to a total of 599,000. These included about 207,000 Irish, starting to emigrate in large numbers following Britain’s easing of travel restrictions, and about 152,000 Germans, 76,000 British, and 46,000 French, constituting the next largest immigrant groups of the decade.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States