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”]
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