Around 800,000 Norwegians emigrated to America between the 1830s and 1920s. Measured against its population, Norway was the European country that sent the most people out after Ireland in the period 1860–1910. Norway was an emigration country long before it became an immigration country.

This history is useful to know if you have moved to Norway yourself. Norwegian emigration history is part of the social studies curriculum, and you can find more articles on this topic exams and tests on SamfunnPrep.

How many left?

Approximately 800,000 people left Norway for North America. The figure is an estimate, but it is well supported: in Statistics Norway's (SSB) historical statistics, the sum of recorded emigrations in the period 1840–1923 is exactly 800,000.

For comparison, 1,035,345 people lived in Norway on 1 January 1825 and 2,799,713 in 1930. Emigration came in waves:

  • 1866–1873 – the crisis years, around 111,000 emigrants.
  • 1880–1893 – over 250,000. The peak year was 1882 with 28,804 emigrants, or 15 per 1,000 inhabitants.
  • 1900–1910 – around 200,000, but now with many who travelled back and forth.
  • 1923–1929 – a final, smaller wave.

It is not correct that one-third of the population left. What is correct is that in the worst periods around one-third of each age cohort left, and that between 1866 and 1910, well over 60 percent of the natural increase of the population left the country.

Restauration 1825: the first voyage

Organized emigration began with the ship Restauration, a sailing vessel of 38 tons that left Stavanger in July 1825. On board were probably 52 people: 45 passengers and a crew of 7. A girl was born during the voyage, so they were 53 when they reached New York on 9 October 1825, after 98 days at sea.

A nice detail in the statistics: SSB's historical table records exactly 53 emigrants for the entire year 1825. Norway's entire emigration statistics for that year is thus just this one ship, including the child born along the way.

They did not leave primarily out of necessity. The leader was a Quaker, and several on board were Quakers or Haugians—religious groups in opposition to the state church, who among other things wanted to escape the Conventicle Act, the ban on gathering as a separate congregation. Upon arrival, the ship was seized and fined for having too many passengers on board. President John Quincy Adams pardoned the captain on 15 November the same year.

Why they left

Norway's population grew rapidly, from 883,000 in 1801 to 2.2 million in 1900, while only a small part of the country could be farmed. When the crofting system was at its peak around the middle of the 1800s, there were around 65,000 crofters in Norway—people who rented land from a farmer and paid with labor. By 1910, the number had fallen to 19,763.

From the USA came the appeal of the Homestead Act of 20 May 1862, which gave immigrants the right to around 650 acres (160 acres) of public land if they lived on it and farmed it for five years.

Here it is worth correcting a common misunderstanding: historians at the University of Oslo reject that poverty was the main explanation. Historian Jan Eivind Myhre states that "hardship was not worse in Norway than in other countries." Nils Olav Østrem points out that what attracted people were generous civil rights, religious freedom, and political participation. Moreover, the ticket was often prepaid by relatives who had already come over, and emigrants sent large sums back home.

It was also not the poorest who left first. The farmers and the more prosperous in the rural areas left earliest; the crofters stayed, and their children moved to Norwegian cities before many of them also moved across.

Where they came from and where they ended up

Emigration started in the inner rural areas of Western Norway and in the upper mountain and valley regions of Eastern Norway, and then spread to the lowlands and coast. Sørlandet sent many from around 1880 because of the crisis in shipping, while Northern Norway had relatively little emigration. From the 1870s, emigration was relatively larger from towns than from rural areas: in 1893–1894, almost 40 percent of emigrants from Kristiania were servants between 15 and 29 years old.

In the USA, Norwegians chose the prairie over the city. They settled in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota. In 1880, over 82 percent of Norwegians in Iowa were farmers.

How they were received

Norwegians in the USA also encountered prejudice and demands to give up their language.

In 1918, the governor of Iowa issued the so-called "Babel Proclamation", which made English the only legal language in schools, public places, and on the telephone. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German were affected. No other state went as far as Iowa—and Iowa was in the heart of the Norwegian core area, where both Luther College and the newspaper Decorah-Posten were located. In the neighboring state of Nebraska, a 1919 law forbade instruction in foreign languages for children before the eighth grade. The USA's Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional in the case Meyer v. Nebraska on 4 June 1923. The governor of Iowa repealed his own proclamation in December 1918, after the war was over.

From 1917 and through the 1920s, the USA tightened immigration sharply, including through quota laws in 1921 and 1924. Norwegian emigration therefore increasingly went to Canada.

Norwegian in America lived for over a hundred years

The language did not disappear with the bans. Between 1847 and the 1980s, around 800 Norwegian newspapers and weeklies were published in the USA—most in Minnesota (216), then Illinois (85) and Wisconsin (82). Decorah-Posten in Iowa came out from 1874 until 1972, with a peak circulation of 40,000–46,000.

Today, just under four million Americans report Norwegian ancestry, according to the American Community Survey for 2024. In North Dakota, this applies to more than one in five residents. The number is declining slowly: it was 4.48 million in the 2000 census.

From emigration country to immigration country

Norway had more immigration than emigration in 1967, and from 1971 it became permanent—that year the net immigration was 6,600 people. It is this shift that makes Norway the country it is today.

As of 1 January 2026, 987,120 immigrants live in Norway, 17.5 percent of the population, in addition to 238,507 Norway-born with immigrant parents, 4.2 percent. Together, it is just over one in five.

Meanwhile, Norwegians and others continue to travel abroad. In 2025, 33,000 emigrations from Norway and just over 55,000 immigrations were recorded. Emigration from Norway is therefore probably higher today than during the major waves in the 1800s, although the figures are not directly comparable. The difference is that the majority of those who leave now are immigrants who are moving on.

The Norwegian Emigration Museum sums it up like this: one country's emigrants are another country's immigrants, then as now.

Want to read more? SamfunnPrep has a separate article on immigration to Norway and the most important waves and an overview of important dates in Norwegian history.

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