Twenty-four hours after Donald Trump won the American election, Google searches for “move to Canada” had spiked by more than 5,000 per cent. The interest was nothing new: plenty of Americans tweeted their intentions to head north in 2016. But this time they want to make good. Ryan Rosenberg is a Vancouver-based immigration lawyer who recently launched Trumpugees.com to manage the post-election influx of inquiries. Here he talks to Maclean’s about the biggest challenges around moving, how Canada’s recent immigration crackdown factors in and why, regardless of who’s in the White House, super-rich Americans are probably going to stay put.
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The volume of requests is much higher. For the first couple of weeks after the election, it was three or four an hour round the clock. Trump has moved much farther right on the political spectrum since 2016, which has broadened the playing field in terms of people looking to escape his second term. We have received inquiries from people on the far left, as well as from Republicans who are still left of Trump. There are U.S.-based companies interested in shoring up their Canadian operations to give their employees an opportunity to work here. That’s mostly in tech—video games and software development companies. And then we’re also hearing from Americans who are already living in Canada and are now worried about what a Trump presidency might mean for their permanent residency applications. We’re calling those people surplus Trumpugees.