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The Irish

Note that not all Chinese immigrants are from China! Countries as disparate as Thailand and Jamaica both have significant Chinese populations and both groups have immigrants to Canada bypassing China completely.

Indeed. There are Chinese enclaves in most parts of Latin America too. Most decently sized cities in Latin America have their own Chinatown.
 
That's true too. Rio, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires have large Chinese populations too.
It is a pretty peculiar experience to visit one of them and seeing Chinese-descent shopkeepers speaking in fluent Spanish. It's not surprising in context, but just very different and unexpected when coming from a Canadian background.

Sidenote: I did get the impression though that there was a substantial amount of money laundering occurring in these places. I take it becaus there is even less inquiry into peoples activities there than in North America. Plus, the local government just perceives it as an injection of money into the local economy. I've chosen to highlight this just as an example of how interconnected the global economy is nowadays, and how unreasonable I think it might be to prevent foreign money (largely from Asia) from entering the Canadian housing market. There will probably always be ways for it to enter, including through Latin America.
 
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It is funny, because the Prairies were largely settled by recent migrants to Ontario who then headed west. (Like Ukrainians)

And since the 1940s, Ontario has gained Ukrainians relative to the Prairies, although a majority of Ukrainian Canadians (around 60%) I think still live in the Prairies.
 
Most Western states had more transplants than direct immigration. Though two exceptions come to mind.

North Dakota: Not officially the West, but it's a Great Plains state that most closely resembles the Canadian Prairie provinces. I think it had the highest foreign born share of any state in the early 20th century, mostly Germans from Russia and Norwegians.

Utah: A lot of Mormons immigrated from England in the 19th century. I used to think English ancestry was high just because Mormons are really interested in genealogy, but in fact Mormonism had a lot of converts in the UK. I think the number of American transplants and British immigrants was about equal in Utah.
 
Most Western states had more transplants than direct immigration. Though two exceptions come to mind.

North Dakota: Not officially the West, but it's a Great Plains state that most closely resembles the Canadian Prairie provinces. I think it had the highest foreign born share of any state in the early 20th century, mostly Germans from Russia and Norwegians.

Utah: A lot of Mormons immigrated from England in the 19th century. I used to think English ancestry was high just because Mormons are really interested in genealogy, but in fact Mormonism had a lot of converts in the UK. I think the number of American transplants and British immigrants was about equal in Utah.

California seems to be a state strongly associated with transplants (even up to today), alongside Florida, although both places have lots of new immigrants directly arriving currently too. I'm sure there were lots of immigrants and transplants alike who chose to go to California after it became part of the US (during the Gold Rush period), since the number of Californians who descend from prior to that time (eg. when it was part of Mexico) seems quite low. I find it interesting that despite the fact that the US has a lot of territory that used to be ruled by France and Spain (eg. before the Louisiana Purchase), there's no analogous region (except maybe New Mexico) in the continental US to Quebec, where a majority or large proportion of people descend from pre-Anglo-American settlers.

There are a lot of Scandinavian Mormons, such as Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, too -- if I'm not mistaken, it's a similar story to the UK, mostly converts who later moved to the States.

How about Canadian Mormons -- did they mostly descend from converts or American settlers? I know Alberta was settled quite early on by Americans and include some of the earliest Mormon settlements in Canada, but I'd assume many in places like Toronto converted much later.

And since the 1940s, Ontario has gained Ukrainians relative to the Prairies, although a majority of Ukrainian Canadians (around 60%) I think still live in the Prairies.

Was this gain from moving to Ontario from the Prairies, or from direct immigration from Ukraine?

A few things:

Brazil and Peru have quite large Japanese populations.

Note that not all Chinese immigrants are from China! Countries as disparate as Thailand and Jamaica both have significant Chinese populations and both groups have immigrants to Canada bypassing China completely.

I don't know much about Peru, but the Wikipedia article on Chinese Peruvians claims that hundreds of thousands to over a million people have some Chinese ancestry. Have no idea how accurate the sources would be, but the high end of that estimate (1.3 million) would place it on par with the number of Chinese Canadians, which would seem surprising.

However, I'd imagine that the Chinese ancestry of Peruvians came from much earlier in history and there'd be lots more people of partial or more distant Chinese ancestry there than in Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Peruvians
 
Looks like I underestimated the role of immigration in other Western states. For instance in 1920 foreign born and second generation whites made up 46% of the population in California and 45% in Washington State.

North Dakota is 67% foreign born or 2nd generation whites. That's the same as Massachusetts, and just behind Rhode Island, the most "foreign" state at the time. North Dakota (20%) is behind Rhode Island (29%), Massachusetts (28%), New York and Connecticut (27% each) in terms of actual immigrants.

Source p. 317 of this book: https://books.google.ca/books?id=Hl...&q=immigrants and their children 1920&f=false
 
Interesting piece on Irish Catholics in Toronto, who suffered from bitter discrimination in the mid-19th century but were pretty much accepted/integrated by WWI.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/03/14/19th-century-toronto-irish-immigrants-a-lesson-in-upward-mobility.html?referrer=https://m.facebook.com/

Some reasons:

- They started out among the poor and unskilled, but had moved out of poverty and to a significant degree had entered the middle class

- Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, mostly Jews and Italians, started coming after 1900. The Irish just didn't seem very "foreign" anymore.
LOL @ white people being discriminated against. That's nothing compared to what blacks and Muslims are suffering now. Really this "discrimination" was so small it's offensive to even mention it out of respect to minorities.
 
LOL @ white people being discriminated against. That's nothing compared to what blacks and Muslims are suffering now. Really this "discrimination" was so small it's offensive to even mention it out of respect to minorities.

It would be common enough in early 1900s Toronto to see "Help Wanted" signs in storefronts with the proviso that "Irish and Jews need not apply".

That was hardly the least of it.
 
I'm trying to figure when the Irish "melted." I'm guessing it must have been around a century ago or so. There really are no historical accounts of Irish Torontonians post-WWI so it's hard to know.
 

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