• Coming to the United States
• Immigration and Religion Statistics
• Montenegrins

Gold miners in California, coal miners in Colorado, steel workers in Pennsylvania, senators, congresspeople and governors in Ohio, Illinois and Maryland, Academy-award winning screenwriters in Indiana, and let's not forget one of the most celebrated inventors of the 20th century - these are just a few of the professions of Serbian and Montenegrin Americans.

This guide is intended as an introduction to the subject of Serbs and Montenegrins in the United States, be they immigrants born abroad or people of Serbian descent born in the United States, regardless of whether they or their ancestors came from Serbia proper, or from other places in Southeast Europe such as Montenegro, Bosnia, or Croatia. Because the Serbian communities in North America are linked via common religion, language, publications, or ethnic affiliation, this guide also contains some information about Canadian Serbs, but the emphasis is on resources for communities in the United States.

The overview below provides only broad outlines of the story of Serbian and Montenegrin immigration to the United States. To help you explore the topic of Serbian and Montenegrin Americans in more detail we have selected and described in this guide materials from the Library of Congress collections.

Coming to the United States

Tradition holds that Serbs have been in the United States since 1815, but that may have been just one man, George Fisher, who immigrated to Louisiana. In subsequent decades more Serbs followed in his footsteps to New Orleans and Texas and eventually made their way to California, spurred on by the Gold Rush to populate mining posts in western states. Other Serbs settled near burgeoning Slavic communities in San Francisco - sailors and fishermen from Dalmatia and the Bay of Kotor region of Montenegro finding a similar environment and profession on a new continent.

The early numbers of Serbian immigrants were not large, however by the 1880s the United States saw the first significant wave of Serbian immigrants flocking to San Francisco. Like the earlier immigrants, these Serbs mostly came from the Austro-Hungarian regions along the Adriatic coast or from the Krajina, the former military border region that once protected Austria from the Ottoman Empire. Few of these earlier immigrants came from Serbia proper. Why did they come? They were looking for greater economic opportunities, escaping from heavy taxation, fleeing difficult political circumstances or hoping to avoid service in the Austro-Hungarian military. Most were younger, uneducated men intending to make their fortunes and return to their homeland.

Immigration of Serbs carried on at a high level into the first two decades of the 20th century, peaking in 1907, with Serbs continuing to settle in greater numbers in the western states, but especially in industrial centers of the East Coast and Midwest such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. Lacking strong educational credentials, the new arrivals ended up joining the working class with physically demanding and dangerous jobs in heavy industries and mining. With the advent of the Balkan wars in 1912, followed closely by World War I, immigration numbers from the region slowed, with some immigrants even returning to the Balkans to fight for their native countries. After World War I, the United States changed its immigration policy, introducing strict quotas to greatly limit the number of people who could come. The end result was far fewer Serbian newcomers in the 1930s than in previous decades. The immigrants from this first wave formed fraternal organizations and founded Serbian Orthodox parishes for mutual support and to maintain linguistic and cultural contacts with one another. Selected publications by and about the settlers from this time period are included in the guide.

The situation changed dramatically after World War II, when Serbian displaced persons and those fleeing the communist regime were allowed to emigrate in greater numbers, bypassing the quota system. This wave of immigration was different than the pre World War I wave in that the majority of the immigrants fled political, not economic, circumstances, and had attained higher levels of education before emigrating. And larger numbers came from Serbia proper than ever before. The new immigrants settled more in urban areas in New York and New Jersey, as well as the more traditional locales of California, Illinois and Ohio. Many of these Serbs were associated with the Chetniks who fought against the communists during the war. They maintained in emigration a political awareness and higher level of political activity than the immigrants who came in the previous wave. This new wave of immigrants sparked a resurgence of interest from the community in Serbian traditions and publishing overall. Publications by former Chetniks or in remembrance of the Chetnik struggle in particular make up a significant part of the post World War II Serbian American publishing output. A selection of these materials are listed in this guide, with many more to be found in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

After the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and into the present, Serbs have continued to emigrate to the Unites States, partly due to family ties, partly to dissatisfaction with the political situation, but also from the general brain drain of highly-educated younger people looking for a better economic future. Publishing by the Serbian American community continues in Serbian to this day, but likewise in English for those Americans of Serbian and Montenegrin descent who never learned the mother tongue but are interested in their heritage.

Immigration and Religion Statistics

Exact figures on the number of Serbian and Montenegrin immigrants are impossible to ascertain, because people were counted by countries or regions of origin that did not necessarily correspond to ethnicities, thus they may have been counted as Austrians or Dalmatians, not Serbs or Montenegrins. Further complicating the numbers was the practice of counting Serbs and Montenegrins together with other Orthodox arrivals like the Bulgarians, if they came from Ottoman-controlled lands. A detailed explanation of the various statistics and their sources appears in the book Yugoslav Migrations to America.

Of the three main Yugoslav ethnic groups to have immigrated to the United States Serbs are known to have been the smallest in number, thus the figure of 20% of the total sum of Yugoslav immigrants has become the rule of thumb for estimating the Serbian and Montenegrin immigrant population. See the entry for Serbs in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups for details.

The 1923 Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor External (page 130) shows that between 1899 and 1923, 696,000 South Slavs (Bosnians and Herzegovinians, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Slovenians) had immigrated to the United States. What percentage of this group was Serbs and Montenegrins is unknown. The 1930 U.S. census of population showed a Yugoslav-born population of 211,000 living in the United States, with most living in the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, California, Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota, and Indiana. Again, it is not possible to determine precisely which of these were Serbs and Montenegrins. The 1940 census shows the Yugoslav-born population in the United States had shrunk to 161,000,reflecting that the population was not growing after the introduction of drastic quotas. This number, however, may not take into account the number of U.S born children of the earlier immigrant generations. The data shows only the number of foreign-born population, not the number of people living in the country of Yugoslav descent. The figures also pertain only to those who were foreign-born or who had at least one foreign born parent. For the broader picture see the table below which traces the number of Yugoslav-born for 9 decades linking to the original source of the data. The Serbian and Montenegrin populations would be approximately 20% of the total.

• 1920 census External - 169,000 - (Table 4. Region and Country or area of birth of the Foreign-Born Population 1850-1990)
• 1930 census External - 211,000 - (Table 4. Region and Country or area of birth of the Foreign-Born Population 1850-1990)
• 1940 census External - 161,000 - (Volume 2, Table 49, page 43)
• 1950 census External - 144,000 - (Volume 2, Table 49, page 1-98)
• 1960 census External - 166,000 - (Table 4. Region and Country or area of birth of the Foreign-Born Population 1850-1990)
• 1970 census External - 154,000 - (Table 4. Region and Country or area of birth of the Foreign-Born Population 1850-1990)
• 1980 census External - 153,000 - (Table 4. Region and Country or area of birth of the Foreign-Born Population 1850-1990)
• 1990 census External - 142,000 - (Table 4. Region and Country or area of birth of the Foreign-Born Population 1850-1990)

After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the 2000 census numbers are for Serbia.

• 2000 census External - 10,000 (the number for Yugoslavia overall is 278,000) - (Table 3. World Region and Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population: 1960 to 2000)

The Census Bureau also produces an American Community Survey which gives estimates for ancestry by ethnic group. For 2021 the number of people with declared Serbian ancestry External is 193,000 people in the United States.

The Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service External is another good source of information on the number of Serbs and Montenegrins who came to the United States, but the INS continued to count them as part of Yugoslavia until 2003, when they started to count Serbian and Montenegrin immigrants separately. Beginning in 1992 the countries of Croatia and Slovenia, and in 1994 the country of Macedonia, are no longer included in the Yugoslavia figure, so the Yugoslav immigration count is more accurate for Serbian and Montenegrin newcomers than in previous years, although the Yugoslav figure also contains immigrants from unknown republics. This source does not provide information on how many people of Serbian descent live in the United States.

Besides the U.S. Census of Population and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Religion Census, formerly conducted by the U.S. government, but now conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, gives insight into the population of members of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Again, the figures are not a precise number of people of Serbian descent or Serbian immigrants, but because the Serbian American community is so closely tied to its churches, it adds further relevant information. The site also has maps showing locations of U.S. Orthodox populations by state and for the country as a whole.

• The 2020 study External reports 60,000 adherents of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the United States, down from 69,000 in 2010

Data on membership in the Serbian Orthodox Church in the USA is available for earlier years on the site of ARDA (Association of Religion Data Archives) External. Chose the U.S. report or the report by individual state, and then chose the year of the report. The Serbian results appear alphabetically under S.

Montenegrins

Montenegro was an autonomous principality from the 17th century until 1922, when its people merged with neighboring South Slavs to form the new country of Yugoslavia. After 84 years in Yugoslavia Montenegro became an independent nation once again in 2006. In this guide we consider the Montenegrins and Serbs in the United States as one community, as most Montenegrins identify also as Serbs. We mention them at times as a separate group in acknowledgement of their separate nation status, while also recognizing that culturally Serbs and Montenegrins in the United States share their language, the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, and common parishes of the Eastern Orthodox religion. The Library of Congress recently acknowledged the Montenegrin language and assigned a code for use in bibliographic records, but many relevant items will be found cataloged under the Serbian language as well.