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A Polish American ( ), is a citizen of the United States of Polish descent. There are an estimated 10 million Polish Americans, representing about 3.2% of the population of the United States. No distinction is made in the American census between ethnically Polish Americans and descendants of non-ethnic Poles, such as Jews or Ukrainians, who were born in the territory of Poland and considered themselves Polish nationals. Therefore, some say, of the 10 million Polish Americans, only a certain portion are of Polish ethnic descent. On the other hand, many ethnic Poles when entering the US from 1795-1917, when Poland didn't exist, did not identify themselves as ethnic Poles and instead identified themselves as either German, Austrian or Russian (this pertained to the nations occupying Poland from 1795-1917). Therefore, the actual amount of Americans of at least partial Polish ancestry, could be well over 10 million. Polish Americans are the largest European ethnic group in the United States of Slavic and Eastern European origin. The first Poles in North America arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1608. Early Polish immigrants of note included Jacob Sodowski, Kazimierz Pułaski and Tadeusz Kościuszko, who were active in America around the time of the Revolutionary War. Overall, more than one million Poles immigrated to the United States, primarily during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Exact immigration numbers are unknown. Owing to the partitions of Polish � Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Polish state did not exist at the time when the precursor to the Immigration and Naturalization Service classified immigrants according to country of origin rather than by ethnicity. The three partitions gave rise to the terms "Russian," "German" and "Austrian" for Polish immigrants to the United States. According to the 2000 United States Census, 667,414 Americans over 5 years old reported Polish as the language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of the census groups who speak a language other than English or 0.25% of the U.S. population. |