The subject of this thesis is the Hungarian emigration to the United States. Specifically, two major migration waves will be examined: the Hungarian immigration between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The reason behind comparing these two waves is that they are special in many ways. While we see a rapid and spectacularly successful integration process for the refugees of 1956, the late 19th and early 20th centuries Hungarian immigrants struggled and took decades to integrate. The principal goal of this thesis is to prove the equal importance of the social backgrounds of the immigrants and the circumstances in the host country in terms of integration by comparing the two waves of migration.