Many of us Latter-day Saints have an immigrant ancestor story. That, combined with the fact that when we entered the valley we were technically in Mexican territory, has helped foment the idea that we are a faith of immigrants.
But how true is it? Was early Utah more naturally immigrant heavy than other places in America at the time? Thankfully one of the most earliest and most consistent questions in the early US census was birthplace, so we can directly compare how immigrant heavy Utah was relative to other states. I used the IPUMS data I’ve used before and created a dichotomous variable measuring whether they were born in the US or not. Quick caveat: the data underwent historical geographic harmonization, so it has the names of current US territories and states even if those states and territories did not exist at the time or weren’t under US sovereignty (e.g. Puerto Rico). However, knowing the exact relationship of every area vis-a-vis the United States at hundreds of time points is quite difficult, so I simply set it to equal “immigrant” if they were born anywhere outside of what we could consider US sovereignty now, and set it to non-immigrant if they would have been born in the United States now. So this won’t capture, say, the US Virgin Islands (I don’t think), but it will capture the vast bulk of of immigration coming from places like Italy and Ireland, and should be sufficient for our purposes.
So what do the data say? If you look at the 1850 Census right after the Saints reached the valley we are the 6th most immigrant-heavy state, with 19% of our population report being born anywhere outside the current US. (Wisconsin was #1 with 36%).
If we look at the 1860 census after the Utah War and starvation years after we had had some time to settle down a little the story is much the same, we still rank 6th but at 33% born outside the current United States.
And where did they come from? A basic-cross tab shows that, unsurprisingly, this is mostly British immigration. Specifically, 19% of Utahns in 1860 were born in England. After that you can detect the “core” original group: Illinois, New York, and Iowa. The next largest immigrant group are the Danes at 4% of Utahns, then Scotland and Wales at 5% together.
| % | |
|
England
|
18.56
|
|
Illinois
|
5.16
|
|
New York
|
4.93
|
|
Iowa
|
4.06
|
|
Denmark
|
3.95
|
|
Scotland
|
3.14
|
|
Wales
|
2.43
|
|
Ohio
|
2.34
|
|
Pennsylvania
|
2.30
|
|
Missouri
|
2.01
|
|
Canada
|
1.62
|
|
Massachusetts
|
1.33
|
|
Germany
|
1.19
|
|
Tennessee
|
1.05
|
|
Ireland
|
0.91
|
|
Indiana
|
0.84
|
|
Vermont
|
0.83
|
|
Kentucky
|
0.69
|
|
Connecticut
|
0.67
|
So yes, we were, at least in our early stages very much a faith of immigrants, which is perhaps why anti-Mormons went to great lengths to shut down Latter-day Saint in-migration; they knew it would severely hurt the Church.
IPUMS citation:
Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Matthew Sobek, Daniel Backman, Grace Cooper, Julia A. Rivera Drew, Stephanie Richards, Renae Rogers, Jonathan Schroeder, and Kari C.W. Williams. IPUMS USA: Version 16.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V16.0
Code:
if (!require(“ipumsr”)) stop(“Reading IPUMS data into R requires the ipumsr package. It can be installed using the following command: install.packages(‘ipumsr’)”)
ddi <- read_ipums_ddi(“LOCATION/usa_00025.xml”)
data <- read_ipums_micro(ddi)
table(data$BPL)
attributes(data$BPL)
data$BPL[data$BPL == 997] <- NA
data$immigrant<-ifelse(data$BPL>120, 1, 0)
table(data$BPL, data$immigrant)
attributes(data$STATEFIP)
attributes(data$PERWT)
data_1850<-subset(data, YEAR==1850)
crosstab_1850<-crosstab(data_1850, STATEFIP, immigrant, weight=PERWT)
data_1860<-subset(data, YEAR==1860)
crosstab_1860<-crosstab(data_1860, STATEFIP, immigrant, weight=PERWT)
crosstab_1860<-crosstab(data_1860, STATEFIP, BPL, weight=PERWT)
crosstab_1860_t <- as.data.frame(t(crosstab_1860))
Utah_1860 <- crosstab_1860_t[“V40”]
Comments
9 responses to “A Faith of Immigrants: How Many Migrants Were in Early Utah?”
I was surprised that Norway didn’t make this list, as my great-great grandfather came to Utah from Norway after converting and then later returned to serve a mission there.
I checked and .41% of Utahns in 1860 were born in Norway, so less than Sweden (.5%), but more than Alabama (.26%) and Switzerland (.23%).
I’m more surprised that Utah was only 6th than where the immigrants came from. IMO these match what you would think from missionary efforts.
England was very successful, and was early (1837) in missionary efforts. Wales and Scotland came soon after (because they were part of Great Britain), but faced some language barriers and had smaller populations than England.
Denmark was next most successful — but only started in 1850, about the same time that France, Germany and Italy were opened. But France and Italy saw very few converts and closed quickly, while Germany faced heavy government restrictions in its various places, and limited success. In contrast, Denmark had the right religious climate, since it had recently put religious freedom into its constitution, making it easier for success than other European countries.
Norway is difficult because it had a smaller population than Denmark, and had less religious freedom. Norway was technically part of Denmark until 1814, and then was a domain of the King of Sweden until 1905. This complicated missionary efforts, of course.
Having said all that, I wonder what later censuses might show — 1870, 1880 and 1890 — since Mormon immigration continued past 1890. I don’t think the percentage would necessarily go up, but the ranking might change, and certainly the mix would change.
I’ll probably do a future post on the immigrant/ethnic composition of Utah across all the decennial censuses that have full-count information (up to 1950), but I tried to load the whole file all at once and I got the spinning pinwheel of death (I think it was something like 17 GB), so when I do the full quantitative history it’ll take some time to download the files separately and do it piecemeal.
Great post – Impressive amount of time and effort, for which we are grateful. One question to Stephen C: in your 23 Aug. comment above, you mention 3 sources of immigrants – one of which was Alabama. That sounds like a typo – did you mean some European country instead?
Sorry, I switch from referring to outside-US immigrants to just “where are they from,” the immigrant numbers I give earlier in the OP are from-outside-the-current-US immigrants.
I think it is interesting that even with the 12 states and 7 countries in the list, we’re only up to 58% of the population. Which means that if you asked a random Utahn in 1860 where they were born, the most likely answer would not be any of the places on that list. (Seems like by 1860 ‘Utah’ ought to be on that list somewhere.)
I was only focusing on the top non-Utah states and countries, but yes, Utah was 35% Utah-born in 1860, so here’s the entire set that adds up to 100 (should have just posted this to begin with).
Utah 34.85111
England 18.5595568
Illinois 5.15680649
New York 4.9317372
Iowa 4.058666403
Denmark 3.947368421
Scotland 3.1361298
Wales 2.428769292
Ohio 2.337257618
Pennsylvania 2.30015829
Missouri 2.010783538
Canada 1.624950534
Massachusetts 1.33310249
Germany 1.19212505
Tennessee 1.046201029
Ireland 0.9052236
Indiana 0.835971508
Vermont 0.82855164
Kentucky 0.692520776
Connecticut 0.66778789
California 0.610902256
New Jersey 0.56885635
Maine 0.52186387
Sweden 0.507024139
Virginia 0.44271864
New Hampshire 0.42787891
Norway 0.4105659
Michigan 0.405619311
Mississippi 0.35862683
Nebraska 0.3487337
United States, ns 0.324000791
Alabama 0.2621686
Switzerland 0.234962406
Texas 0.21270281
North Carolina 0.165710328
Australia and New Zealand 0.153343886
Delaware 0.143450732
Wisconsin 0.111298
Italy 0.098931539
Georgia 0.093984962
Maryland 0.0865651
Louisiana 0.084091808
Rhode Island 0.066778789
France 0.066778789
Colorado 0.05688564
South Carolina 0.056885635
AFRICA 0.046992481
Abroad (unknown) or at sea 0.037099327
SOUTH AMERICA 0.03215275
Arkansas 0.03215275
Kansas 0.027206173
District of Columbia 0.022259596
New Mexico 0.01978631
Mexico 0.014839731
Netherlands 0.014839731
Spain 0.012366442
Florida 0.01236644
Oklahoma 0.009893154
Hawaii 0.007419865
Native American 0.004946577
U.S. Virgin Islands 0.004946577
Poland 0.004946577
Yugoslavia 0.004946577
Gibraltar 0.002473288
Portugal 0.002473288
Austria 0.002473288
Other USSR/Russia 0.002473288
China 0.002473288
Pacific Islands 0.002473288
Idaho 0.002473288
Minnesota 0.002473288
Oregon 0.002473288
West Indies 0.002473288
This post reminds me of the historical work of Dean May. I recall that his Utah textbook reported that 35% of Utah residents in the 1870 census were born outside the U.S. I believe he also placed these kinds of figures in historical context. For instance, during the pioneer period it was common that an immigrant would not see his or her family appreciably assimilated into American life until their grandchildren started growing up, since the children of (one or more) immigrant parents tended to to speak the language of their parents and live in an ethnic enclave. If you consider this expanded or cultural definition of immigrants, I believe I read that the foreign-born and their immediate children made up two-thirds of the Utah population in the 1890 census. But please feel free to double check these numbers with the IPUMS data.