Quote:
Originally Posted by thewave46
Like many migrants who made a life somewhere that was far from home and was a one-way kind of deal, they made the best of it. If I had to venture as to what made them stay, it was their kids. The parents did the hard work of coming to somewhere foreign so that their kids would have the chance to grow up locals in Canada. As a product of those immigrants a few generations removed, I am quite happy they did.
Nostalgia for the old country in Northern Ontario is pretty much a nostalgia for the tourist version of the country their parents left behind now. Not too many native Italian, Serbian, or Finnish speakers left in Northern Ontario these days.
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Upwards of a quarter or even half of all Italian immigrants to North America in the early part of the 20th century returned to Italy, but not after the Second World War.
Why? Seems fairly obvious: the postwar explosion of wealth. In 1910, subsistence wages in a teeming tenement in lower Manhattan wasn't really much of an upgrade over the peasant life in Sicily, but the vast improvement in work and life conditions in Brooklyn (or College in Toronto, or the North End of Hamilton etc.) in the 1950s and 60s would have been impossible to give up to go back to...being a peasant in Sicily.
You'll give up a tuberculosis-ridden address on Mulberry Street in 1910, but you won't give up a Cadillac, or maybe more accurately, the realistic
promise of one, in 1965.