European Americans are Americans of European ancestry. This term includes people who are descended from the first European settlers in the United States as well as people who are descended from more recent European arrivals. Before the arrival of Europeans in the United States, the Native Americans predominantly inhabited the United States.

The first significant European immigration wave, spanning the 16th to 18th centuries, consisted mostly of settlers from the British Isles attracted by economic opportunity and religious freedom. These early immigrants were a mix of well-to-do individuals and indentured servants. Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants arriving during the 1840s and 1850s made up the second wave of European immigration, fleeing famine, religious persecution, and political conflicts. In the greatest population movement in human history, some thirty-five million Europeans immigrated to the United States in the century after 1830

After a pause in European immigration during the U.S. Civil War, more than 20 million immigrants arrived—primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe—between 1880 and 1920. Most Southern European immigrants were motivated by economic opportunity in the United States, while Eastern Europeans (primarily Jews) fled religious persecution. World War I slowed European immigration, and the national-origin quotas established in 1921 and 1924—which gave priority to Western and Northern Europeans—coupled with the Great Depression and the onset of World War II brought immigration from Europe to a near halt.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s ushered in the most recent wave of European immigration, dominated by people from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The number of European immigrants in the United States has declined slightly since 2000.

According to the US Census 2020, an estimated 183,899,496 (183 million), or 55.76% of the US population self-identified as of Europeans Ancestry. This number can be greater or vary as  many people in that tend to identify themselves simply as Americans (19,416,668 or 5.89%) and over 63 million or 19.78% of the United States population ignored the ancestry question and are classified as “unspecified” and “not reported”

also read about White Population in the United States