History
The largest influx of Ukrainian Immigrants to the United States came in the early 1990s right after the fall of The Soviet Union and a larger majority of those immigrants were predominantly Jewish. Many of the Ukrainians settled down in the cities, creating an ethnic enclave. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 892,922 Americans of full or partial Ukrainian descent. The New York City Metropolitan Area contains by far the largest Ukrainian community in the United States, receiving the highest legal permanent resident Ukrainian immigrant population. While many Ukrainians traveled to the U.S, many also settled down in Canada. The majority of immigrants came from the western provinces – Galicia and the Carpathian regions of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The fall of the Soviet Union gave the Ukrainians a physical liberty from the control of the Soviet Russians. The travel to the west was in hopes of a better life.
The initial experience of these immigrants reflected that of many immigrants of other ethnicities. The first arrivals to Rhode Island were mostly men, who settled in the localities of Woonsocket, Manville, Central Falls, Providence, Pawtucket, and Crompton. They were desperate for work because amongst them were men of other origins who were just as committed to making money, and hopefully bringing their families from across waters into the U.S for permanent residency. The mills employed them in the least desirable jobs and the lowest pay and they climbed the job ladder very slowly. Only manual jobs were given because the majority of the immigrants were men who worked on land in Ukraine as farmers and harvesters. The east coast, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were popular for Ukrainian immigration because the mills and farm lands that they worked on were closer to the water and they were by fast developing city, filled with technological advancements, giving the Ukrainians hope of raising up the ladder.
After the large influx of immigrants in the early 1900’s (late 1800’s to around 1914), the immigration of Ukrainians was sporadic. That is until Post World War II, when families left to avoid the possibility of working in forced-work camps in Germany. Similar to earlier Ukrainian immigrants, the males were the ones to find jobs, mostly in the east coast. When the immigrants were able to find most prosperous jobs, the families were more likely to stay in the U.S and build their families as U.S citizens.
Before the immigration process of many Ukrainians, Ukraine was under the control of the Soviet Russians in which many suffered. The famine of 1921 killed about 6 million civilians under the Soviet control. For the same reason the other countries under the Soviet control left to the West, Ukrainians left in hopes of a better life. There was a lot of devastation in the inter-war Soviet Ukraine. The 1.5 million Ukrainians dead from a civil war that brought power to the Soviet Government and the deaths that resulted from feminine and genocide gave incentive to look west for liberation and prosperity.
Comparatively, the Ukrainian Immigration Population is small so one of the literature gaps found for this particular community is that not much information exists on how they survived or assimilated to the American lifestyle post-immigration. There was a lot of information on how many immigrated over but not much on the family experience as a whole. Majority of the information found concentrated on how the number of immigrations and the same jobs that the men had in order to establish a family in the U.S but not much on the family struggles, or home life or how they overcame the obvious financial struggles of working in such low-class jobs.
