Moving to Canada
Not going to happen, but why not?
After Trump’s second election victory, lots of Americans are talking about emigrating, most commonly to Canada. This happens with every rightwing election win[1], but nothing ever comes of it. With the real prospect of indefinite Trumpist rule, the issues are more serious, but it seems unlikely that much will happen. But why not?
It’s fairly well known that Americans rarely emigrate. There are, for example, only about a million US citizens living in Canada at the moment. Conversely, there are around a million Canadians living in the US. These are surprisingly low numbers for contiguous countries with a common language (except for Quebec) and relatively straightforward paths to migration.
As usual ChatGPT didn’t quite get the text right
More generally, it’s a common rightwing talking point that the USA is the country most commonly named as a desired place to migrate to. What’s less remarked is that Donald Trump’s expressed desire for more migrants from “places like Denmark” reflects underlying reality. Migration from other rich countries to the US is very limited. In 2022, about 300 000 people (excluding tourists) from Europe arrived in the US, and the majority of these were students, most of whom would probably return. And Europe includes a lot of poor countries.
There’s a lot more migration between other rich countries, including between other Anglospheric countries. For example, although Canada has about a 10th of the population of the US, there are about half as many Canadians in Australia (50 000) as Americans (100 000).
The conclusion I draw is that the US is very different from other, superficially similar countries, I’ve visited the US on lots of occasions and had a couple of extended stays totalling two years. But it still seems a very foreign place to me, much more so than New Zealand or the UK, where I’ve been less frequently. And I imagine the same is true, in reverse, for Americans abroad.
Looking at the recent election results, they are in part a reflection of global trends (anti-incumbent, anti-migrant etc). But the vote for Trump was substantially higher than for most of the far-right policies in other countries. I think (hope) that this reflects some specifically American factors.
The option of moving to Canada is, for most Americans, an illusion. They will have to sort out their problems at home, as best they can.
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In the 2000s, I lived in Canada on a working holiday visa and toward the end of a long, dark winter I got a cheap charter flight to Cancun for a week's break from the weather. This was during the Bush era, when there was talk of the "United States of Canada", a division of North America roughly into Canada and the coasts in one country and the rest in another country. So maybe I was primed to see it, but the sense of there being two types of Americans was stark. I didn't stay in Cancun itself, but did the backpacker thing around the Yucatan Peninsula where I met lots of Americans who I thought of as "normal" - basically like any of the people one meets when travelling.
Then there was another cohort whose ignorance was truly staggering. On an eco tour, I shared a canoe with a middle-aged couple who were in Mexico for the third time. We also had a local in our canoe, who was there with her five-year-old son and husband who both ended up in a different canoe. At one point the canoes were separated and came together again and the little boy started saying, "Hola!" and waving. The American woman loudly said to her husband, "What's he saying? Oh, he's so cute! What's he saying?"
The "normal" Americans didn't seem any more capable of relating to this cohort than I was. I wish I could put my finger on what it is that makes them unique. Obviously there are ignorant people in Australia and the UK, but there's something about the assertiveness of American ignorance that is remarkable. Maybe it's a demographic thing, in that there are large areas where "normal" people are in the minority while the ignorant dominate. That leads to a pandering to the kind of attitudes and behaviours that are marginalised in Australia.
In 1992 when I became an Australian citizen there were 70,000 Yanks here [AUS population 17M]
Today there are 26M Australians with only 30,000 more Americans!