Looked upon as a classical country of immigration towards the end of the 17th century the Palatinate soon became a region of which the emigrants trunk was a significant symbol of its situation, particularly in the 19th century.

Already at the beginning of the 18th century, the Palatine share on the German emigration was so large that the designation Pfalzer' or 'Palatine'soon became a current term that stood for all German-speaking immigrants.

The debarkation of 13 families from Krefeld in the port of Philadelphia in October 1683 and the foundation of Germantown under Franz Daniel Pastorius marked the beginning of the organized emigration of Germans to the North American continent. They followed the invitation of William Penn who had visited Germany a few years before. As the Pennsylvanian Historian Arthur Graeff wrote, 'William Penn's invitation to the New World brought a new ray of hope to the hapless victims of religious persecutions and economic disasters which had been visited upon the people of the Rhine area for almost a century.'

Already in the early seventies of the 17th century a group of Palatine Huguenots coming from France originally and first settled in the area of Speyer, Mannheim and Frankenthal emigrated to North America. Their settlement on the Hudson river in the English colony, the later state of New York, was called New Paltz after their immediate stop over.

But the next main wave of German emigration to North America did not follow until 1709 and 1710 after Queen Anne had invited Europeans to settle her colonies in North America. About 20 to 30,000 Germans, mainly called Palatines'went in these years to London in order to get a ship to America. The English government was not prepared for such a great number of immigrants. Not all of them could be shipped into the New World. A large number had to return, others were settled in Limerick County in Ireland.

Thousands of German emigrants followed their countrymen in the following decades to North America. In 1727 the newcomers were arriving in such great numbers that the English colonists in Pennsylvania were disturbed to see the steady flow of non English settlers pouring through the port of Philadelphia. In order to keep this movement under control, in 1727 the assembly passed a law that all 'Palatines' be required to take an Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown. Between 1740 and 1756 there were 30.000 male adults who took the Oath of Allegiance. A real mass migration had started. For example in 1751, 16 vessels brought 4,134 persons to the port of Philadelphia. Large parts of the Country of Pennsylvania as well as the Northern part of Maryland soon had a 'thoroughly German character' as it is stated in a contemporary report. The British were soon afraid it would come to a predominance of the German element. Benjamin Franklin for example said. Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours ? Why should Pennsylvania founded by Englishmen suffer to become a colony of foreigners who shortly will be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of Anglifying them... The majority of the Palatine emigrants were farmers who frequently lived together in closed settlements so that their dialect was preserved to a very large extent. The so-called Pennsylvania-Dutch, mixed with many English expressions is still alive today. In Lancaster and Berks County even church services are held in the Pennsylvania-German dialect.

Among those who emigrated to America in the 18th century in large numbers were the Mennonites, among them several hundred Amish people who had lived in the Alsace-Lorraine area and in the Palatinate before. In many cases the Mennonites were suspected as heretics by the civil servants and the clergy of the three authorized denominations of the German Empire and treated as second rate citizens. According to the promises of William Penn not only the Huguenots, Mennonites and Amish found an asylum in America. Also the members of other denominations and sects emigrated. The Moravians, called MŠhrische BrŸder or Herrenhuter here, founded settlements in Bethlehem/Pennsylvania and in Salem/North Carolina. The Seven-Day-Baptists, the 'SiebentŠger-Gemeinschaft' founded Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, which became one of the most important German cultural and economic centers of Colonial North America. Johann Peter MŸller from Alsenborn was for many years the prior of Ephrata Cloister and was 'one of the most fascinating personalities of 18th century German emigration'. During the War of Independence Ephrata Cloister and Johann Peter Miller supported Washington's troops after the battle of Brandywine in 1777 and therefore 'helped to prepare the way for a free America'.

During the War of Independence only a minority of the Palatines supported the British side. Most of these Loyalists fled to Nova Scotia in Canada. The majority of the Palatines fought energetically for the Union and the final break with the British Crown and many Palatines formed Volunteer Riflemen Corps. Side by side with these Palatines, soldiers of the Regiment 'Royal Deux Ponts' fought among the French auxiliary troops commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau. All these soldiers came from the duchy of ZweibrŸcken. An officer of this regiment, which played a decisive role at the important battle of Yorktown in 1781, Baron von Closen wrote in his diary: The fertility of the country, the climate, the manners of the inhabitants, the German language, which in this part of Pennsylvania is more frequently spoken than English, the way to plough the fields, to build houses, all this reminds me of my beloved home-country, and although I have travelled more than 1800 miles from there in search of adventures, I almost believe, to be true, to have been transported suddenly into the center of our beautiful Palatinate...

After 1770, especially after the outbreak of the War of Independence, the German emigration to America stopped. The Palatines turned to new destinations: to Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary where Frederick the Great, Cathrin the Great and empress Maria Theresia invited people to settle.

While the Palatinate as well as the whole region west of the Rhine river was a part of France between 1797 and 1814 only a few America-emigrants can be found. Only after the end of the Napoleonic era, after the Palatinate became a part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, the emigration to the United States started again. After climatic unheavels in the years 1816 and 1817, crop failures and famines, when a great number of bakers had to stop baking because there was no flour and when 'the poor people tried to appease their hunger with green fodder from the fields or even with herbs and roots' (Weidmann) about 15,000 inhabitants from the Baden-Palatine-Alsatian area emigrated to America. In the 1830s thousands followed the invitation of the new Brazilian Emperor Pedro I. and emigrated to Southern Brazil. At the beginning of the 1830s, especially after the 'Hambacher Fest', the meeting at the Hambach castle near Neustadt, the first voluntary mass demonstration in German history, thousands emigrated to North America. The liberal journalist Georg Friedrich Kolb of Speyer wrote in 1833: An emigration from these areas to America had already taken place previously, but most of the time it was a single phenomenon, mainly valid for the poor who did not know how to support themselves any more. But now there was a change. Well-to-do, wealthy, and even rich people left their fatherland in masses. They did not have to dissipate any worries over food, they did not flee because of a pursuit of their inner judge; the bitter pain which was expressed in view of the loss of their dear fatherland could not stop them, they faced the terrible cholera right away , but - they rushed towards the Land of Freedom that should take the place which the former Palatinate could no longer hold.