How large is the Ukrainian diaspora, and what role does it play in North American politics?
Mass emigration from the Ukrainian lands started in the late nineteenth century in connection with rural overpopulation and the lack of opportunity at home. Beginning in the 1870s, Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who at first were predominantly young men intending to return home after earning some money, went to the northeastern United States as coal miners and industrial laborers.
In the long run, however, many were joined by their families, and vibrant Ukrainian communities developed in such American cities as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Beginning in the 1890s, another stream of Ukrainian immigrants began arriving in the New World from the Austro-Hungarian Empire: peasants who were willing to resettle permanently with their families if they could obtain arable land. Their original destinations were Brazil and Argentina, but Canada soon emerged as the most popular choice. Seeking to colonize the prairie provinces and secure a workforce for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the Canadian authorities welcomed Ukrainian peasant immigrants. By the time of World War I, an estimated 500,000 Ukrainians had left for the New World.As Ukrainian peasants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire crossed the ocean in search of a better life, about two million of their brethren in the Russian Empire migrated eastward to western Siberia and Central Asia, where vacant land was still available. Very few ethnic Ukrainian immigrants came to North America from the tsarist state, but by the late nineteenth century the majority of Jewish immigrants arriving in North American cities hailed from the Russian Empire. Usually self-identifying as “Russian Jews” or “Polish Jews,” they were more often than not from the territories that today constitute Ukraine. Jewish immigrants from Ukraine were fleeing the legal and economic discrimination they suffered under the tsars, as well as the violent pogroms of 1881 and 1903-1905.
The next large immigration wave from Ukraine came at the end of World War II and consisted of refugees from the Stalin regime, as well as some slave laborers in Nazi Germany, who preferred to resettle in the West. Numerically much smaller than the earlier wave of economic immigrants, with only some 80,000 coming to the United States and 30,000 to Canada, this well-educated generation of “displaced persons” soon took over Ukrainian community organizations in North America, establishing the anti-communist political profile of the Ukrainian diaspora. For the first time, postwar immigrants established notable Ukrainian communities in Great Britain and Australia, with an estimated 20,000 settlers each.
Whereas these earlier immigration waves created and maintained Ukrainian churches and community organizations in the West, the new economic migrants of the post-communist period have rarely joined them. Most of the new arrivals since 1991 have been Soviet- educated economic migrants who found it difficult to identify with the nationalist and clerical agenda of most diasporic organizations. Young professionals leading a busy urban lifestyle also constitute a significant portion of the new Ukrainian immigration. It was really only during the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005 and again during the crisis of 2013-2014 that the new immigrants came out in large numbers to organize, together with the established Ukrainian community organizations, public rallies and vigils in major Western cities.
Recent censuses counted 1,209,000 people of full or partial Ukrainian descent in Canada and 961,000 in the United States. Such major North American cities as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Edmonton, and Winnipeg have visible Ukrainian neighborhoods or a strong Ukrainian cultural presence. Voters of Ukrainian background exercise some political influence in Canada's prairie provinces, where they constitute a significant share of the population, as well as in Toronto. Ray Hnatyshyn, a Ukrainian Canadian, served in 1990-1995 as the twenty-fourth governor general of Canada; the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan have all had Ukrainian-Canadian premiers. Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian-Canadian community organizations have consistently supported democratic change in Ukraine.