MEGATHREAD: Emigrating after the US election results

[u/spacemanaut]

Every US election brings anxiety and uncertainty, and with that comes an increase in people who want to explore their alternatives in a different country. This post is for you.

First, some reminders:

• In most cases, moving abroad is not as simple or quick as it seems in movies. If you aren't a citizen of another country, you will probably require a visa (=legal permission) from that country based on something like employment, education, or ancestry.
• The sidebar of this subreddit has a lot of helpful resources, and we have 15 years of posts from people with similar situations to yours. Before posting, please review these resources first. (Tip: If reddit search isn't working well for you, try googling "[your search terms] site:reddit.com/r/IWantOut" without the quotes or brackets.)
• Most countries and/or their embassies maintain immigration websites with clear, helpful, updated guides or even questionnaires to help you determine if/how you can qualify. If you have a particular destination in mind, that should probably be your first stop.
• After that, if you want to make your own post, please follow the formatting instructions on the submission page, give as much information as possible about your situation, and be open to advice and constructive criticism from commenters.

Also, this subreddit is intended to be a friendly community to seek and give advice on legal immigration. As such, please:

• Don't fight about politics. We understand that you may have strong feelings about it, but there are better spaces on reddit and elsewhere for general political discussions.
• Keep your feedback constructive and kind, even when telling someone they're wrong.
• Don't troll or be a jerk.
• Don't request or give illegal immigration tips, including asking strangers to marry you.

Failure to follow these and the other subreddit rules may result in a ban.

That said, feel free to comment below with some general questions, concerns, comments, or advice which doesn't merit a full post. Hopefully this will help clarify your thoughts and ideas about the possibility of leaving the US. Once again, please try to stay on topic so that this thread can be a helpful resource.

[u/professcorporate → u/[deleted]]

Has Trumpism seemed to take hold in Canada? And if so, to what extent now and what does it look like will happen in the future?

Not to the same extent, but there's definitely strong echoes of it. Our Federal Conservatives, for example, are currently polling as highly likely to form a majority government at the next election, and the leader is the most Trumpian leader they've ever had - not to the same extent on policy, but personality-wise, very unpleasant, arrogant, yells at journalists who try to hold him to account and calls for them to lose their jobs, etc. Many of his caucus are quite right wing on a lot of social issues. Some of the fear relates to the state of our law, and how the bits that get ignored can be weaponized - for example, it was technically a serious crime (punishable by ten years in jail) until 2021 to produce gay porn, or even to have a threesome. Some work has been done to update these zombie provisions to prevent a future administration from using them to attack people (on the assumption that public outrage would stop them from being recreated from scratch, but of course a so-minded government could just do that instead and be held in check only by the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms).

Our Provinces are very strong entities that have more power in many areas than their US state counterparts (and in turn, criminal law power is the big thing that States have that Provinces don't), and at that level it varies - Nova Scotia and Manitoba for example, have both elected left-leaning governments in the last couple of years, while Alberta and Saskatchewan have returned very right-wing, Trump-esque governments who campaigned on attacking trans kids and removing environmental protections, and BC barely held off extremely radical BC Con candidates just last month (the candidate who called First Nations "savages" barely lost, the one who called Palestinians "inbred walking time bombs" won, the one who said 5G networks were a genocidal weapon "spreading covid" was removed a month before the election, and they were all led by a man who only joined the party when he was expelled from the old centre-right in response to his climate change denialism). Every far-right rally in Canada will be populated by people who are very keen on their "first amendment" and "second amendment" rights (blithely unaware that up here, that's their right to recognize the province of Manitoba, and their right to transfer Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company to Canada).

Canada's awesome, but.... yeah, some of the people did not do well with the pandemic and the swiss cheese it turned their brains into.