When presidential candidate Donald Trump won seven states on Super Tuesday, Google Data Editor Simon Rogers tweeted out, “Searches for ‘how can I move to Canada’ on Google have spiked +350% in the past four hours.” Rumors began flying the next day that the search had crashed Google.
Honestly, the news puzzled me. I went to sleep knowing that Trump had won multiple states and woke up to find that some Americans were considering deserting. Apparently, Canada was the latest and greatest place to live, all because of one man. Are we seriously being bullied into moving out of our great country, all because of one man who used to sit in a chair and just repeat the words “you’re fired” to increase his ratings? Well, as a person who has been bullied in the past, I am not going to take this lightly. I am not going to move to Canada.
First of all, moving is expensive. Not only did I have to buy boxes and tape when I moved across town, but I also rented a U-Haul. Just to move from the south side of Indianapolis to the rural parts of Shelby County costs about $100 a day for a 20-foot-wide truck. A quick search on the U-Haul website shows that to rent the same size truck to move from downtown Indianapolis to Toronto, Ontario, Canada costs $854 a day, not including how much you would have to spend on boxes and packing tape. I can hear your wallet crying from here.
Cartoon by Kyle Dunbar and Michael Rheinheimer
On a more serious note, emigration is another issue I have with moving to Canada. I have never traveled outside of the United States, but I have watched friends as they prepare for Spring Term trips to different parts of the world. Getting a passport, making sure your medical record is clear— the whole process takes months to work the kinks out of. And that is just for traveling somewhere for a few weeks and then coming back. The rules for officially moving into a county vary, and it may take years to get official citizenship.
Sure, if you have family already settled in the country, or you have a job waiting for you, your chances of getting in are pretty good. But just because you show up at a country’s border with a moving van does not mean you automatically get to go on in and live a new life, free of Trump and whatever else you are running from.
Finally, I will not be bullied into moving to Canada because leaving the country does nothing to solve the issues our country is facing in the coming years. Many important pieces of legislation, from gun rights to transgender bathroom laws, are coming and need to be voted on by us. And if we decide to give up, who will be here to vote?
Moving to Canada will not help solve anything. If we, as Americans, truly want to keep our country moving forward. We should stay where we are and work together as a country to overcome all of the pressing issues we face.
