A quote from David Baeckelandt at The Flemish American blog, 5 July 2008

The 2000 US Census listed 348,531 people claiming "Belgian" ancestry (down from more than 380,000 in 1990). Less than 15,000 specifically listed "Flemish" as their ethnicity. A superficial reading of these numbers would lead the uninformed to believe that the number of Flemish-Americans is so small as to be meaningless. The reality is that Flemish-Americans – as defined by their origins in the Dutch-speaking regions of today's Belgium and France – are the majority. The vast majority of emigrants as tracked by the Belgian government when debriefed before embarkation during the largest decade of Belgian emigration to America were from the Flemish provinces of East and West Flanders and Brabant.

As these late 19th and early 20th century Flemish immigrants established clubs and associations in the U.S. they chose names like "Familiekring" and the "Flemish American Club". Some Flemish immigrant clusters, such as the one in Chicago that was an important part of my family’s social life, glossed over the discrimination remaining in their homeland and called themselves a "Belgian-American Club". But even then the inequalities of the past were not entirely forgotten. When the cornerstone of the Belgian-American Club of Chicago was laid in 1921 it carried the inscription that "All Belgians are Equal".