Is it safe to come back yet? Meet the Americans who fled to Canada as soon as Trump was elected

Canada would have been forgiven for building a wall of its own. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 led to predictions of a mass exodus north to escape the incoming presidency.  

“We woke up to the horror the next morning and that’s when I decided that I couldn’t remain in the United States,” says Jonathan Holiff, who fled Los Angeles in 2017.

The 55-year-old TV producer and documentary filmmaker sold all his possessions, packed a car, and drove to British Columbia as part of what he calls a new class of “political refugees”.  

It’s a similar threat being levelled in 2020 as 3 November approaches, with a YouGov poll suggesting one-third of Americans are interested in moving to Canada if the election doesn’t go their way, and celebrities like John Legend and Tommy Lee saying they’ve considered moving somewhere like Europe if Mr Trump wins a second term.

In 2016, high-profile celebrities like Meghan Markle, Cher, Snoop Dogg, Lena Dunham and Miley Cyrus pledged to flee the country if Mr Trump won.

He did. They didn’t.

The most relevant data available from 2016 to 2020 suggest the expected flood of regular Americans didn’t happen either.

But some certainly kept to their word. Statistics from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada compiled for The Independent show citizen grant applications from US residents increased from 3,037 in 2016, to 5,085 in 2017, and 5,844 in 2018.  

The latest figures available for 2019 show a small dip from the previous year down to 5,686.

To be granted citizenship, however, applicants need to be permanent residents for at least two years. Permanent residents in Canada from the US saw an uptick from 7,655 in 2015 to 8,485 in 2016 and 9,140 in 2017. The number increased again to 10,905 in 2018 before dropping slightly to 10,780 in 2019. So far in 2020, when most travel has been restricted by the coronavirus pandemic, there have been 4,650 permanent residencies approved by Canada during the first three quarters of the year, a 45 per cent drop from the same period last year.

While that’s not a flood of disaffected Americans spilling over the country’s northern border as predicted, it’s not entirely a mirage.  

After moving to Victoria on the country’s west coast, Jonathan Holiff founded the organisation US Ex-Pats and Allies Canada to lobby the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to accommodate greater numbers coming from the US if Mr Trump wins again in 2020, and raise money for those that can’t afford to move independently.

As a dual citizen – Jonathan moved to Los Angeles three decades ago to work on 1980s sitcom Growing Pains – returning to Canada was not as difficult as it was for those without visa credentials.

Of the 50 Americans in his group, half moved to Canada as a direct result of the Trump presidency after 2016. They have been going through various tourist visas, education visas, work visas or entrepreneurial waivers on their way to achieving permanent residency.

Most have needed to stay beyond the original limits through legal waivers and extensions.

“Normally we think of refugees as people coming from war-torn zones and of course having little means. And there are a lot of people who are not privileged and don’t have the resources to relocate to other countries,” Mr Holiff says.  

“But we’re really talking about a whole new class of political refugees, those people with means, so it’s hard to reconcile the term ‘refugee’ with this population, but nonetheless I think that’s what we’re looking at if Trump refuses to leave office.”

Americans moving to Canada might not be considered refugees in the traditional sense. But for those who have fled their home country, the danger is no less real, according to Mel, a member of the US Ex-Pats and Allies Canada who agreed to speak anonymously to not jeopardise his visa process.

Mel moved with a spouse and high-school-aged son from the San Francisco Bay area to British Colombia as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold in early 2020. They left behind family, friends, and established careers in tech and social services. Mel was able to move on a study permit, which allowed for a spousal work permit.

For the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, the move to Canada was the end of a four-year thought process that materialised with the election in 2016, solidified with Charlottesville in 2017, and was galvanised with the 2018 mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

“It became clear to me that the US was dreadfully out of line with our values and was descending into a really dark and backwards place,” Mel says.

“We were no longer willing to remain and give our gifts and talents to a country that is out of sync with our values. We wanted to be in a country that was going forward.”

Even if Joe Biden wins in November, he has no plans to return home.

“I’m a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, so history has clearly shown me that a platform built on hatred and self-service will never end well. And even if they don’t knock on my door first, that knock will surely come," Mel says.

Jessica Slice, 37, and husband David, 40, moved from North Carolina to Canada with their adopted 3-year-old child, Khalil, in August 2020.  

While the couple didn’t have any plans to leave the US immediately following Mr Trump’s election in 2016, they began seriously considering the move when they became parents and started the process to leave in early 2018.  

“I didn’t consider myself at risk under the Trump presidency and thought I had a moral obligation to stay… until I became a parent,’ Jessica says.  

“We just spent time looking at being a black boy and a black man in the United States, and the difference between being a black boy and a black man in Canada. We felt the evidence made a better case for Canada.”

Jessica, a freelance writer, and David, a software engineer who remains working for a US company remotely, became permanent residents through the Express Entry programme, a process that took them 18 months and is designed for skilled immigrants who can contribute to Canada’s economy.

David had gone to graduate school in Canada, so the family had a network of friends when moving to Ontario this year, and their permanent residency could lead to dual citizenship, which they see as a gift they can give their son.

In the immediate aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, a record number of Americans wanted to leave the United States, according to a Gallop poll.

In 2017 and 2018, 16 per cent of people surveyed said they wanted to permanently move to another country. While that fell to 14 per cent in 2019 and 13 per cent in 2020 amid the pandemic, it remains higher than any point during the presidency of Barack Obama, when 10 per cent wanted to leave, or the presidency of George Bush, when 11 per cent wanted to leave.

At the height of Americans’ desire to move in 2018, more than a quarter (26 per cent) named Canada as the place to go – more than doubling the 12 per cent that selected the country in 2016 before Mr Trump’s election.

Other English-speaking countries, however, regularly rank highly on the list of countries Americans see as potential exit strategies.

Elizabeth Sullivan and her partner Gabriel Metcalf moved with their two sons, aged 13 and 17, from San Francisco to Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, in January 2019 on a temporary skill shortage visa.

The 48-year-old psychotherapist left behind her dream office, private practice and family split between the east and west coasts. The boys left behind their friends and schools, but Elizabeth says their bravery and resilience to start a new life has allowed the family to get as far away from the Trump presidency as geographically possibly.

Now an outsider looking in from the other side of the world, she has been donating to the Biden-Harris election campaign and will be absentee voting from Sydney.

“I have been glued to social media following the election, it is so overwhelming I cannot look away… things have gotten much worse. Trump has turned the US into a massive failure,” she says.

“I would vote for an inanimate object over Trump. I think Biden’s chances of a legal victory are excellent, but Trump is declaring loudly that he intends to steal the election if he can – and as he managed to do so last time, I am quite worried.

“We would love to stay in Australia and have a safe place for our kids and future grandkids to live in a normal country. If Trump steals the election again we may decide to do it.”

If they decide to remain in Australia, the family will join American ex-pats that see leaving the country as the best decision they’ve made.

While Canada remains one of the most common countries for US ex-pats overall, it’s not among the best-rated locations for American citizens considering leaving the country for political reasons, according to ex-pat community group InterNations.

The group’s 2019 Expat Insider survey of more 20,000 ex-pat members ranked Canada at only 20 out of 64 locations, with the top five filled by countries in Asia (Taiwan and Vietnam), Europe (Portugal and Spain) and Latin America (Mexico).

Lisa and Joe Graziano, previously of Colorado, moved to Portugal in February 2019. After their first scouting visit to Europe in the immediate aftermath of Mr Trump’s 2017 inauguration, it took a full two years for the couple to secure a residency visa and move to Porto on the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula.

A former professional musician turned real estate agent, Lisa, 61, sold her concert harp for $20,000 along with the family’s Denver home and belongings to fund the relocation and purchase the Portuguese property needed – along with a raft of other conditions – to qualify for the residency visa.

“We were just at a point where nothing was working for us there. The health care system is a joke, there isn’t a health care system really. The legal system is a joke. Just everything became bad. We had been in Denver for 26 years,” she says.

“The tipping point was when Trump was elected. At first, I couldn’t believe it. There was the shock that he actually won. I said, that’s it, we’re out of here. And of course, nobody believed me or they thought I was kidding.”

After convincing her husband, who had never been to Europe and doesn’t speak Portuguese, they packed up their belongings, along with their jack russell-mix, Jiva, and moved to Portugal. While friends and family in the US thought they were joking at first, they’re now asking for advice on how they did it.

They’re still closely following the 2020 election campaign and plan on casting an absentee ballot for Biden-Harris in Colorado as their “moral duty” to vote. Regardless of the outcome, there’s no world in which they return to the US.

“I knew it was going to be bad, but holy mother of OMG, we had no idea how bad. We feel so vindicated now, everyone is saying, ‘wow we want to move there too’. Or, ‘you were so right’. We did the right thing,” Lisa says.

“It is the best decision we have ever made and we’re living the dream over here. It’s fabulous. The food, wine and weather couldn’t be better. People are nice. It’s gorgeous, it’s beautiful, it’s safe. The healthcare system is ridiculous… it’s so cheap it’s ridiculous, it’s a dream, it really is, it’s how it should be.”