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The Scottish Diaspora
The Scottish diaspora consists of Scottish people who emigrated from Scotland and their descendants. The diaspora is concentrated in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, England, New Zealand, and Northern Ireland and to a lesser extent Argentina, Chile and Brazil. In the 2013 American Community Survey 5,310,285 identified as Scottish & 2,976,878 Scots-Irish descent. Large scale emigration from Scotland to America began in the 1700s after the Battle of Culloden where the Clan structures were broken up and as a result of the Highland Clearances. The Scots went in search of a better life and settled in the thirteen colonies, mainly around South Carolina and Virginia. The majority of Scotch-Irish originally came from Lowland Scotland and Northern England before migrating to the province of Ulster in Ireland and thence, beginning about five generations later, to North America in large numbers during the eighteenth century.

The table shows the ethnic Scottish population in the United States from 1700 to 2013. In 1700 the total population of the American colonies was 250,888 of which 223,071 (89%) were white and 3.0% were ethnically Scottish. In the 2000 census, 4.8 million Americans self-reported Scottish ancestry, 1.7% of the total US population. Another 4.3 million self-reported Scotch-Irish ancestry, for a total of 9.2 million Americans self-reporting some kind of Scottish descent. Self-reported numbers are regarded by demographers as massive under-counts, because Scottish ancestry is known to be disproportionately under-reported among the majority of mixed ancestry, and because areas where people reported American ancestry were the places where, historically, Scottish and Scotch-Irish Protestants settled in America and that is along the North American coast, Appalachia, and the Southeastern United States.

Scottish Americans descended from nineteenth-century Scottish immigrants tend to be concentrated in the West, while others in New England are the descendants of immigrants from the Maritime Provinces of Canada, especially in the 1920s. Americans of Scottish descent outnumber the population of Scotland, where 4,459,071 or 88.09% of people identified as ethnic Scottish in the 2001 Census.

Source: Wikipedia
Last Update: August 2016