United people, United States

United people, United States
308 million people

this image makes more sense if you have this song [link] playing in the background

[link] German American 16.5% (51 million people)
[link] African American 12.4% (38 million people)
[link] Irish American 12% (36 million people)
[link] Mexican American 10% (31 million people)
[link] English American 9% (28 million people)
[link] American 7.2% (20 million people)
Either Scottish American [link] , Scotch-Irish American [link] , Welsh American [link] or a mix between some or all peoples mentioned (may include English)
[link] Italian American 6% (18 million people)

[link] French American 3.8% (11.5 million people)
[link] Polish American 3.3% (10 million people)
[link] Dutch American 1.6% (5 million people)
[link] Norwegian American 1.5% (4.6 million people)
[link] Puerto Rican American 1.4% (4.4 million people)
[link] Native American (includes Aleut and Eskimo) 1.3% (4 million people)
[link] Filipino American 1.2% (3.5 million people)
[link] Chinese American 1% (3 million people)
[link] Cuban American 0.5% (1.7 million people)
[link] Portuguese American 0.5% (1.4 million people)
[link] Dominican American 0.4% (1.4 million people)
[link] Japanese American 0.3% (1.2 million people)
[link] Finnish American 0.2% (0.7 million people)
[link] Spanish American 0.2% (0.6 million people)
[link] Native Hawaiian 0.1% or (0.3 million people)

This list is not exhaustive, but contains only those ancestries mentioned on the 2000 Census Map as having the largest population in any given county of the United States.

[link] Multiracial American 2.4% (6.8 million people)


(1/24/11) edit: apologies for the delay, but in the course of answering some of your questions I took the time to read the US census pdf files regarding U.S. ancestry [link] [link] and the above map

In hindsight I probably should have read the articles and done the intellectual legwork before I posted. Anyway, the following seems pertinent to the conversation:

“The US Census Bureau defines ancestry as a person’s ethnic origin, heritage, descent, or ‘roots,’ and it may reflect a person’s place of birth, the birthplace of his or her parents or ancestors, or ethnic identities that have evolved within the United States.”

“Nearly 12 million fewer people specified “African American” as their ancestry than gave that response to the race question. One reason for this difference is that some people who reported Black or African American on the race question reported their ancestry more specifically, such as Jamaican, Haitian, or Nigerian, and thus were not counted in the African American ancestry category.”

“The geographic patterns of ancestry data show the endurance of the awareness of ancestries even when a group’s largest immigration to the United States occurred many decades ago.”

“For some ancestries, continuity in geographic distributions from 1900 to 2000 is evident…Ancestry data reveal the country’s links to many heritages and illuminate our diverse roots.”

2000 Census
total population in the census: 281 million people
population that specified ancestry: 225 million people
population that specified one ancestry: 163.3 million people
population that specified multiple ancestries: 62.0 million people
population whose ancestry is unclassified: 2.4 million people
population that didn’t report ancestry: 53.7 million people

edit (6/20/11) my apologies to those who thought so, but the map itself is not mine but is here courtesy of Wikipedia [link] , all I have done is add the appropriate flags around the border

2/19/12 EDIT:
map base source [link]
map base created by Gpvos [link] and Ras67 [link]