This will be a post long on musing and short on evidence. But I have two anecdotes about Canadians, or at least Canadian-bound immigrants.

In grad school I met a Chinese woman who moved to Canada for her undergrad, but her express purpose was to eventually find her way into an American graduate school (which she did). She knew that not only would a Canadian undergraduate degree look good to an American Grad school, but she also knew that she could get her American visa while living as a student in Canada, and that it would be easier to do that than to get a visa while living in China. Most people don’t realize, but even if you’re accepted to a University, you aren’t guaranteed a student visa. The American state department can reject your visa if they think you’ll overstay, and the staff are very strict when issuing visas in China and India, but much more lax when issuing visas in Canada.

Now why didn’t she do her undergraduate degree in America? I don’t know, I never asked. Maybe it was too expensive, maybe she couldn’t get in. But she was open an honest that she though an American degree was better than a Canadian one, and much better than a Chinese one, and so getting an American degree was crucial for her career.

And a researcher I know at my current job has Canadian citizenship, but he and his family immigrated there with the intention of eventually reaching America. I don’t know how, but he said it’s a lot easier to get permanent residency and citizenship in Canada as opposed to America, and it’s a lot quicker. And once you’re a Canadian citizen, you have a much higher chance of getting a visa into America compared to an Indian citizen.

Like in China, the state department considers Indian citizens to be at a very high risk of overstaying their visas, and so are reluctant to give visas to them. But Canadian citizens are low risk. If you eventually want to move to America for work, moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen can be a long-term strategy.

So how common is this overall? I have absolutely no idea, but I’d like to know. I know that recently both Canada and America had very high spikes of immigration. Canada under Trudeau defended its immigration policy on economic grounds as bringing in more workers to grow the economy, America under Biden instead used humanitarian grounds, as America being a beacon for the tired, poor, and huddled masses. But during this spike, there were still stories of people coming to Canada and then trying to use that to move to America.

So how true is this, and what are the implications? A troubling implication would be if Canada was seen as a “secondary” destination for many migrants, who would only go there if they thought or knew they wouldn’t be able to go to America. That would mean the international opinion of Canada’s economy is rather low, and also that it probably wasn’t receiving the best and brightest compared to America (because the best and brightest are more likely to be accepted into America).

This could also have ramifications to how Canada is affected by American policy. America is endorsing a highly restrictive immigration policy. Will this cause more immigrants to seek Canada, as they cannot reach America? Or will it cause *less* immigrants to seek Canada, as many of them *only went to Canada in order to reach America, which they now cannot do*?

Canada is also changing its policy at the same time, so teasing apart a single cause is difficult, maybe impossible. But it does make me think.

I was once talking to an econ guy at a conference, and he said that if every country on earth adopted open borders, most countries would see their immigration plummet as almost all immigrants they would have received would instead go to the United States. I don’t know if this is true, and he was an American of a certain political persuasion, so he may have had emotional reasons to believe this is true. But if anyone else out there has evidence of this, I’d love to see it.