It has been known for some time that there was great variation in the rate of emigration from the individual regions of the European countries. We do not have a comprehensive set of regional emigration rates from all European countries but some of the well-known emigration regions are listed in Table 4. We can see that about one-third of all Finnish emigrants came from one province (the area around Vaasa), about a half of all Austro-Hungarian emigrants in 1881–1910 came from Galicia and the Bukovina, about a quarter of all German emigration in the peak years came from West Prussia and Pomerania, and about 14 per cent of all English and Welsh emigrants in 1861–1900 came from the five counties of the West of England (Baines, 1986, 144, 158; Chmelar, 1973, 319; Foerster, 1919, 38; Kero, 1974, 60; Knodel, 1974, 109).

Emigration regions raise the question of the most appropriate unit of analysis. This does not mean that the nation state in which he or she happened to be living was irrelevant to a potential emigrant. A minority of the European emigrants actually came from racial or ethnic minorities. These were often minorities with nationalist expectations and/or were suffering from degrees of discrimination. The Poles were heavily over-represented among emigrants from both Austria-Hungary and Germany. The bulk of the emigrants from Russia were from minorities (Jews, Poles, Lithuanians). Three-quarters of the Romanians entering the United States before the First World War were from the Transylvanian provinces of Hungary which were being Magyarised (Bobinska and Pilch, 1976, 13; Ferenczi and Willcox, 1929–31, 1, 416; Kuznets, 1975, 50–7).