La Ruee vers le Sud: Migrations du Canada vers les Etats-Unis 1840-1930 (review)

Over the years, there seems to have emerged a consensus that the history of Canadian emigration to the United States ended, or at least dramatically declined, with the dawn of the twentieth century. In part, this may be explained by the assumption that with the Laurier years, and the economic boom times that accompanied them, Canada became a magnet for immigrants, thus there was less focus on emigration. Also, the history of Canadian migration to the United States has been mainly the story of the mass exodus of French Canadians, which, as demographers like Yolande Lavoie demonstrated, intensified, beginning at the time of the American Civil War. Because of French Canadians' minority position within Confederation, the demographic hemorrhage to the south was the subject of intense scrutiny for Quebec's political, cultural, and clerical elites. The history of the late nineteenth-century French-Canadian emigration movement has been richly documented by the likes of Yves Roby, François Weil, Bruno Ramirez, and others, in part because of the mass of documentation to be found on the subject - on both sides of the border. Taken together, these works contributed to a scholarly focus on French-Canadian emigration, and on the latter 'crisis' decades of the nineteenth century. When these historians did deal with the twentieth century, they confirmed that Franco-American communities were composed increasingly of second- and third-generation immigrants, as French-Canadian emigration appeared to taper off. The twentieth century heralded the creation of a specifically Franco-American identity, and a perceived decline in the attractiveness of the United States as a potential destination for French-Canadian migrants. Thus it seemed natural to suppose that emigration from Canada was an exclusively French-Canadian problem, and that if one attempted to place this problem within a specific historical period, the twentieth century was marked by discontinuity with the nineteenth.

Bruno Ramirez's La Ruée vers le Sudis meant as a long-overdue corrective to these two common misperceptions. The title is somewhat misleading. It indicates that the study will examine southerly Canadian migration during a ninety-year span from 1840 to 1930. In effect, the book is based on the discovery of a United States government series of statistics, the Soundex Index to Canadian Border Entries to the U.S.A., which provided the author with a reliable source for the quantification of Canadian emigration to the United States 1906-30. What Ramirez has found is worthy of note, and the sections of the book that deal exclusively with the early twentieth century have the most appeal, since this is a period about which less is known. Indeed, much of this twentieth-century material is breaking new ground. In addition, the Soundex Index permits the author to deal not simply with the Quebec aspect of the diaspora, but to widen the perspective to include Canada's other regions, in this case the Atlantic provinces, Ontario, and the West. This allows for both a comparative perspective between Canadian regions, and the spatial mapping of the cross-border migration patterns from Canada to the United States. Marcus Hansen once wrote eloquently of the 'mingling of Canadian and American peoples.' This book, perhaps more than any other, demonstrates just how important the mingling of Canadians into American society has been. In doing so, Ramirez provides a much-needed corrective to the view, propagated by many popularizers of US history, that theirs was a country peopled exclusively by trans-Atlantic immigrants. Also noteworthy is a chapter on British and European migrants who came to Canada, only to finally chose the United States as their ultimate destination. Canada emerges from this work in a new light: as an original source of mass migration, and as a gateway...