To understand why French Canadians have struggled to settle in the west, historians have focused primarily on cultural differences. New research reveals that English and French speakers have somewhat different personal characteristics. Large-scale migration into New England balanced the demographic and human capital profile of French Canadians. Although if by the 1880s the U.S. had introduced immigration controls, many French Canadians would not possibly have been redirected westward, writers claim. There was little chance of later chain migration of French Canadians to the West, they add, without much of the base built by the beginning of the twentieth century. The only mainly French-speaking province in 1867 was Quebec, although it was one out of four provinces. Just about 5% of western Canada's white population spoke French as their mother tongue in 1901. Political structures in the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were most unlikely to be built with Francophones in mind without a significant minority of Francophone voters in the early 1900s. Chain migration is sometimes provided as a dominant explanation, but every chain has a beginning, for the locational concentrations of migrants of one ethnicity or regional history.
