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Hungarian Americans are Americans of Hungarian descent, either through ancestry or immigration. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were approximately 1.396 million Americans of Hungarian descent in 2018. The total number of people with ethnic Hungarian background is estimated to be around 4 million.
The largest concentration of Hungarian Americans is in the Greater Cleveland Metropolitan Area in Northeast Ohio. At one time, the presence of Hungarians within Cleveland proper was so great that the city was known as the "American Debrecen," with one of the highest concentrations of Hungarians in the world.
The first core wave of Hungarian immigrants to the U.S. arrived in 1849 and were largely well-educated people leaving for political reasons. The second Hungarian wave was mostly poor and uneducated immigrants seeking a better life in America. An increase of immigration from Hungary was observed after World War II and The Holocaust, a significant percentage of the new Hungarian Americans being Jewish. Another spike occurred after the failed 1956 revolution.
A large number of Hungarian Americans did not emigrate from Hungary itself, but rather were ethnic Hungarians who came from Romania, Czechoslovakia, or the former Yugoslavia.
By percentage of population, the most Hungarian states in the U.S. are Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Indiana, Vermont, and Florida. Ohio also leads with the largest number of Hungarian Americans overall. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)