‘Trump bump’ citizenship bids were just a blip
• The number of Americans applying for Canadian citizenship jumped slightly after Donald Trump’s election, but numbers are still only half what they were five years ago.
New statistics from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada obtained by the National Post show an average of 400 U.S. citizens put in their applications in each the first four months of this year, compared to an average of 264 per month in 2016 — including a spike in applications in November, the month Trump was elected.
But overall — despite reports of the immigration website crashing on election night, and earnest tourism campaigns sprouting in Cape Breton, N.S. — the trend line has gone down in the past couple of years.
In the decade since 2007, applications peaked in 2011, with an average of 564 Americans per month applying to become Canadians.
A batch of data to the end of 2016 was obtained through the access-to-information system and newer numbers were provided by Immigration spokesman Rémi Larivière.
The numbers do not include Americans who may have moved to Canada recently to become permanent residents, or who already live here — just those who are applying for citizenship to seal the deal.
The website for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada crashed Nov. 8 while Americans were voting in their presidential election.
In the lead-up to the election, the idea of moving to Canada became a popular tongue-in-cheek reaction to the prospect of either electoral outcome — with Americans deeply divided between supporting Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and many apparently voting against one or the other rather than for them. It appeared some were taking it more seriously when the immigration website crashed.
All of the traffic was not necessarily election-related, however. The first day of a new system requiring visafree travellers to apply for Electronic Travel Authorizations was Nov. 10, and had visitors heading to the site to fill out forms and pay $7 fees.
Canadian tourism had benefited from an apparent surge in interest.
A “Cape Breton if Donald Trump Wins” website sprung up early last year — attracting a Washington Post feature — and in the fall, Cape Breton’s tourism industry association reported a 14 per cent increase in tourism over the previous year.
The “Trump bump” wasn’t a major anomaly in numbers of new U.S.-born citizenship applications, however, the data show, although there could be a delay in seeing the “bump” in the data if people moved to Canada in the past six months intending to apply for citizenship later.
Either way, it appears the number of Americans opting to become citizens has significantly decreased. In the past 10 years’ worth of data, 2016 and 2015 saw the lowest numbers of applicants, with 3,168 and 3,623 applicants, respectively. In each of the seven preceding years, there was an average of 5,712.
About 88 per cent of U.S.born applicants end up being granted citizenship, based on the years 2008 through 2015. More than 42,000 applicants between March 2007 and April 2017 have become Canadian citizens (with many applications from the past few months yet to be processed).