Scandinavian Immigration
Scandinavia is a region in northern Europe composed of the countries Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Finland and Iceland are often included as part of the region as well, and immigration from these five countries will be discussed in this chapter. The Scandinavian Peninsula, on which Norway and Sweden are located, lies north of the Baltic Sea. Denmark is situated on the Jutland Peninsula, which is bordered on the south by Germany and by a group of islands in the Baltic Sea lying across a narrow strait from Sweden. To the west of Sweden and south of Norway lies Finland, which shares its eastern border with Russia. Iceland is an island nearly 600 miles west of Norway between the North Atlantic and the Arctic oceans. The northernmost portions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland are in the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Circle is a parallel of latitude at 66.5° north of the equator that marks the northern frigid zone.
In the 2000 U.S. Census, 10.5 million people claimed descent from one of the Scandinavian countries: approximately 4.5 million from Norway, 4 million from Sweden, 1.4 million from Denmark, 623,573 from Finland, and 42,716 from Iceland. Most of the emigration (leaving one's country to go to another country with the intention of living there) from the Scandinavian countries took place during the eighty-year period from 1840 to 1920.
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