Book Review

By tracing the movement of rural Quebecers and Italian sojourners in and out of New England in his excellent On the Move (1991), Bruno Ramirez helped bring Canada into the evolving history of labor migration in the north Atlantic economy. In this important new book, he further enriches U.S.-Canadian history by describing the movement of both French and English Canadians back and forth across the entire continental border. The use of the Soundex Index to Canadian Border Entries, compiled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, enables the author to correct a number of stereotypes and lend precision to previously impressionistic ideas. Some of his discoveries are unremarkable. It has long been known, for example, that most French Canadians who went to work in the New England textile industry were poor, rural migrants. Given the higher socioeconomic status of Anglo-Canadians—as well as recurrent anti-French prejudice—it is also not surprising that the Anglo-Canadians, who migrated into a much broader range of U.S. states, contained a higher proportion of businessmen, professionals, and supervisory personnel than the French workers who moved to New Hampshire and New York. But Ramirez's careful demographic analysis also permits him to challenge the prevailing "two Canadas" view, that is, the opinion that the French Canadian and the Anglo-Canadian migration movements came from two distinct and separate regions of the country. Instead, he finds that each migration stream was complex, multilingual, and overlapping.

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