Immigration lawyers have been flooded with calls from rattled US citizens looking to jump ship to Canada since Donald Trump’s surprise win over Hillary Clinton.
“The seven fold increase of contact is clearly due to be from the election last night,” David Cohen, a lawyer from CanadaVisa.com told The Post. Searches for “move to Canada” and “immigrate to Canada” doubled on Google last night between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
Cohen said his website crashed early Wednesday.
“On a regular day we get about 1,000 people using it. Just last night between midnight and 6 a.m., we had 6,000 people filling out the free assessment form,” Cohen said.
He said a lot of Spanish-speakers have also been calling, afraid of deportation under Trump.
“These are people who are afraid they’re going to be deported from the U.S…. there’s also a lot of people calling this morning and asking if they can apply for asylum in Canada.”
Michael Wildes, the managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg, whose father famously fought John Lennon’s deportation, said he’s received a “deluge” of similar calls.
“I average about 50-100 new matters in a single day… this was at least three times that amount and it’s also the intensity. The same person would call and then send an email.”
He said callers are concerned their green cards will be taken away and undocumented immigrants allowed in the country under deferred action will be forced to get out.
Veronique Malka, a Canadian immigration lawyer based in Ridgewood, NJ said many of the calls she received today were from people uncertain about American’s future.
“There’s people reacting saying they don’t know what’s going to be here and they don’t want to raise their children in an unsettled environment. They say they don’t know what the price of things will be, what the economy will be, they want to go north where there’s a tracked history of stability in terms of health care and education and social benefits that are very well established,” Malka said.
She said she’s seen an influx of calls since March when Trump rose as the likely Republican nominee.
“People were concerned, ‘what does this mean?’” Malka said, whose office received three times the amount of calls today than usual.
“There’s several groups affected here. Americans that don’t know what will happen and are worried about the economy and there’s also foreign nationals that are here who are not from the U.S. that are saying they don’t want to go home but they don’t want to stay here either so they’re looking at Canada as a viable option.”
Malka and Cohen called the knee-jerk reactions “emotional” and said we won’t see anything serious, if at all, until he actually takes office.
“The reality is when Obama got elected and Bush got elected, there was a huge influx as well… no matter who’s getting elected there’s a feeling for almost half the population that this person doesn’t speak to me,” Cohen said.
“People move to Canada for work or love, they don’t do it for political reasons.”
The Internal Revenue Service reported a total of 1,380 Americans renounced their citizenship in the third quarter of the year between July and September. This is the second-highest total on record for the period, according to the Washington Examiner.