In the early 1900s there was immigration from Italians, Germans, Portuguese, French, Britons and Greeks. In the 1950s the Italians were the third largest national group in terms of numbers of immigrants, since Ecuador like Mexico and the Andean countries did not receive a significant total number of immigrants. It can be noted that, after World War I, people from Liguria, still constituted the majority of the flow, even though they then represented only one third of the total number of immigrants in Ecuador. This situation came from the improvement of the economic situation in Liguria. The classic paradigm of the Italian immigrant today was not that of the small trader from Liguria as it had been before; those who emigrated to Ecuador were professionals and technicians, employees and religious people from South-Central Italy. It must be remembered that many immigrants, a remarkable number of Italians among them, moved to the Ecuadorian port from Peru to escape from the Peruvian war with Chile. The Italian government came to be more interested in the emigration phenomenon in Ecuador because of the necessity of finding an outlet for the large number of immigrants who traditionally went to the United States but who could no longer enter this country because of the new measures that imposed restrictions in the 1920s. Most of these communities and their descendants are located in the Guayas region of the country.