"...whence came all these people?"

One of the concepts De Crèvecoeur covers in the most famous letter - "What is an American?" is the idea that one of the defining features of the American population is that it is a melting pot of people of varied descent. “The next wish of this traveller will be to know whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen.” He references only European countries to describe the diversity as they were the only countries sending people, but over the years this has changed and now there are huge amounts of people from all continents (save Antarctica) living in the country. This map shows us, by county, the ancestries with the largest populations. Interestingly, despite the immigration from all parts of the world recently, by far the most prevalent descent is still German - not what one would expect from an English-speaking nation, and evidence that norms are perhaps not decided by the majority population. The African-American community is also large, for obvious reasons (clustered mostly in the region most often stereotyped as racist - an intriguing issue, but not the subject of this blog). Near Mexico there are also a great many Mexican immigrants attracted by employment prospects, and for some reason there is a dense cluster of English-descended people in the midwest. All these different ethnicities & descents ensure that there can be no real definition for the term "American" beyond "person who lives in America" - in other words, "From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen." The American melting pot of cultures that has existed since the country was first discovered still exists - indeed, it has expanded its horizons ever further. Americans may have come vastly different distances, for different reasons and at different points in history, but in the end they and their descendents are still all Americans and will gradually become normalised to the ever-shifting concept that is American culture.

(source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408591/American-ethnicity-map-shows-melting-pot-ethnicities-make-USA-today.html)