Poor Women, Proximate Border:
Migrants from Ontario to Detroit
in the Late Nineteenth Century
NORA FAIRES
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, thousands of immigrants arrived in Detroit
from Canada by catching a ferry across the Saint Clair or Detroit rivers
or a steamer across Lake Erie or Huron. This migration, episodically lamented
in Ontario and generally ignored in Michigan, was a major component of
the transnational Great Lakes economy before the automobile boom. As Bruno
Ramirez reminds us, some of these immigrants, advantaged by ethnicity,
race, language, religion, and class, rose rapidly in their new, nearby
homeland. Indeed, in burgeoning Detroit Canadians comprised 10 percent
of the leading manufacturers in 1900.
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