Migration Patterns

Immigrants came to America in the strangest patterns. Italian immigrants and Jewish immigrants and Slavic immigrants came here and settled in the big cities, right? That's a sensible thing for new immigrants to do. Getting settled in a place is hard, and it's that much easier if you can rent a tenement, work in a foundry or something, and be right next to thousands of neighbors who have the same customs as you. The availability of ethnic gangs didn't hurt either.

How is it then that Swedish and Norwegian and German immigrants made up most of the population of places like North Dakota? It's not like they had that much more money than their Italian friends; Scandinavia was the poorest part of Europe in those days. How could they afford to get to America, and then get across the continent, live in terrible weather with terrible growing conditions, with terribly sparse population and buy the necessary plows and horses? Why not do like the Irish?

And if becoming a prairie farmer was that desirable, why didn't the Italians do it? It's mostly what the Italian immigrants did before coming to America; they had a lot of practice at it. Am I supposed to believe that farming conditions in Oklahoma scared off Italian peasants? That's pretty wimpy of them.