Armenian Americans (, amerikahayer) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community in the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the US took place in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the US following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. Between the 1960s and 1980s Armenians from the Turkey, Iran, Lebanon and Syria migrated to America as a result of political instability in those countries. At around the same time immigration from the Soviet Union began. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons.