This is not surprising, though: While the greatest number of slaves imported from Africa were sent to Brazil, totalizing roughly 3.5 million people, they lived in such miserable conditions that male African Y-DNA there is significantly rare due to the lack of resources and time involved with raising of children, so that most African descent originarily came from relations between white masters and female slaves. From the last decades of the Empire until the 1950s, the proportion of the white population increased significantly while Brazil welcomed 5.5 million immigrants between 1821 and 1932, not much behind its neighbor Argentina with 6.4 million, and it received more European immigrants in its colonial history than the United States. Between 1500 and 1760, 700.000 Europeans settled in Brazil, while 530.000 Europeans settled in the United States for the same given time. Thus, the historical construction of race in Brazilian society dealt primarily with gradations between persons of majoritarily European ancestry and little minority groups with otherwise lower quantity therefrom in recent times.