Italians are the fifth largest ethnic group, preceded by the Germans, the Irish, the English and African Americans. The highest concentration of Italians is in New York City

There Are 26 million Italian Americans in the Melting Pot
The United States still receives between one half and two thirds of emigrants world-wide, with or without the required legal documents.

Over the last hundred years America has swallowed up and accommodated hundreds of thousands of Abruzzesi in its melting pot who today lie hidden behind American or Americanized last names which were either changed by the ignorance of immigration officials or because those who held the Italian names originally felt it was a necessary evil in order not to feel foreign in the land of opportunity.

This is one of the reasons why, unlike other countries where immigrants arrived in large numbers a short while before the discovery that multiculturalism is a good thing, it is difficult to track them down. Thus the list of Abruzzesi in America is sparser proportionately than in Canada or Australia.

In the last few decades, however. there has been a sea change and in the 1990 census some 15 million Americans put down with pride that they were Italian American. But the bean counters in the Census Bureau of the United States of America claim that this is low. According to them at least one in ten Americans have Italian blood coursing through their veins and they put the number of descendants of former immigrants at 26 million.

The most Italian city in America is New York, with 1,882,396 inhabitants of Italian origin, followed by Philadelphia (497,721), Chicago (492,158), Boston (485,761), Pittsburgh (316,351), Los Angeles/Long Beach (308,409) and Detroit (280,051).

The State with the most Italian Americans is New York (2.9 million inhabitants) followed by California and New Jersey (1.5 million each), Pennsylvania (1.4 million), Massachusetts (845,000), Florida (800,000), Illinois (730,000), Ohio (640,000), Connecticut (630,000) and Michigan (412,000).

Italians are the fifth largest ethnic group, preceded by the Germans, the Irish, the English and African Americans. The source for this information is NIAF, the National Italian American Foundation, the most prominent Italian American organization in the United States.