Few Americans moved north after Bush win: stats

Okay, who here chickened out? :wink:

Few Americans moved north after Bush win: stats

Last Updated Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:13:08 EDT
CBC News

The hordes of Americans who vowed to move to Canada after George W. Bush was re-elected president last November haven't followed through on the threat, immigration numbers show.

A total of 14,666 Americans applied to emigrate between November 2004 and March 2005, according to statistics from the main processing centre in Buffalo, N.Y. That's 1,600 fewer than had applied in the six months leading up to the U.S. election.

Toby Condliffe, who chairs the Canadian chapter of Democrats Abroad, said he's not surprised there was no exodus of despondent left-leaning voters.

"There's more to moving than just politics," he said. "There's family and other considerations that start to take hold when you start to think about it seriously."

People eventually just calmed down after Democrat candidate John Kerry lost the election, he said.

Within hours of Bush's acceptance speech on Nov. 3, 2004, six times more Americans than usual visited the official Citizenship and Immigration Canada website.

Newspaper articles, television items and blogs later quoted countless Americans who said they couldn't continue to live in a country that would re-elect Bush.

One was Jonathan Lynch of Seattle, who told CBC News that he was thinking of applying for "some sort of political asylum or something."

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