Contrast the religion and socioeconomic status of the early Scotch Irish immigrants in the 1700s to that of the second wave of Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s

Answer 1

The first Irish people to immigrate in substantial numbers to the United States were the descendants of Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in Northern Ireland in the seventeenth century. Large-scale immigration began in the eighteenth century, and by 1775 there were an estimated 250,000 Scotch Irish living in the American colonies. Most of the immigration was the result of an economic depression brought on by a textile slump in Ireland.

Irish Catholics started to arrive in the United States by 1820, and their immigration reached an apex between 1840 and 1860, when approximately 2 million people arrived. The impetus to leave Ireland was not only religious persecution but also repeated crop failures. The potato blight that destroyed their principal crop in 1845 resulted in death by starvation of 1 million Irish people. The Irish Catholics were the first great ethnic minority in American cities.