American Refugees in Canada

Over the past months, I have been meeting an increasing number of Americans who have left the United States and are trying to build new lives in Canada. They are, for the most part, people with the resources, education and legal means to make that choice. They are not technically refugees; they are expatriates who have decided that the political direction of their country has become intolerable.
Are we only seeing the beginning of something considerably larger?
Last week I met a woman who is living here with her partner without legal status. They are non-binary, and they told me they had left the United States because they fear what they described as a coming “trans genocide.” Whether or not we share their assessment of that threat, the fact that they have concluded that Canada is safer than the country they left is itself worth considering.
If the United States continues its movement toward authoritarianism—and particularly if the coming midterm elections produce a significant political rupture things may change quickly and violently. What if America heads into some form of Civil War? We may begin to see Americans arriving in Canada who do not have the money, documentation or carefully prepared immigration plans of those we are seeing here today. They will simply arrive, seeking asylum and hoping that Canada will give them somewhere safe to begin again.
We tend to think of refugee crises as something that happens somewhere else, at someone else's border. Canada and the United States share the longest undefended international border in the world—roughly 8,900 kilometers stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and through the Arctic. It is not an impenetrable frontier or a heavily militarized border. Much of it passes through forests, farmland, lakes and remote terrain.
Are Canadians prepared for the possibility that our closest neighbour could become a source of political refugees on a scale we have never experienced before?
I think we need to think beyond Trump himself and consider what it will mean for Canada if Americans begin fleeing not merely a government they dislike, but a political system that has ceased to be safe, democratic or recognizable as the country they once knew.
Let’s talk about it.