Chilean people are natives of and long-term immigrants to Chile. Chileans are mainly of Spanish, and Amerindian descent with small, albeit important, degrees of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrant ancestry. There is a strong correlation between Chilean people's ancestry or ethnicity and socioeconomic situation: a marked continuum exist between the lower classes of high Amerindian ancestry and the upper classes of mainly European ancestry. Indigenous inheritance (cultural or genetic) is most visible in rural areas and in aspects of culture such as Chilean cuisine and Chilean Spanish. Although post-independence immigrants never made up more than 2% of the population, there are now hundreds of thousands of Chileans with German, British, French, Croatian, Italian or Palestinian ancestry.