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Fuzzy Transnationals? American Settlement, Identity, and Belonging in

Canada
Susan W. Hardwicka
a
University of Oregon, USA

Online publication date: 01 March 2010

To cite this Article Hardwick, Susan W.(2010) 'Fuzzy Transnationals? American Settlement, Identity, and Belonging in
Canada', American Review of Canadian Studies, 40: 1, 86 — 103
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 American Review of Canadian Studies
Vol. 40, No. 1, March 2010, 86–103

Fuzzy Transnationals? American Settlement, Identity,

1943-9954Review of Canadian Studies
0272-2011
RARC
American Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, Jan 2010: pp. 0–0

and Belonging in Canada

Susan W. Hardwick
American
S.W. Hardwick
Review of Canadian Studies

University of Oregon, USA

More Americans now reside in Canada than at any time since the Vietnam War. This
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article documents and analyzes the migration, settlement, and identity of US-born resi-
dents in three Canadian cities. My work helps fill the gap in the scholarly literature on
issues related to international migration at the Canadian–US borderlands. The article’s
overarching goal is to illustrate that transnationality, as exhibited by US immigrants in
Canada, is far more complex than prior studies of transnational identity have indicated.
Findings from this study indicate that transnational linkages and identities are geo-
graphically and temporally contingent and are, as such, a reflection of both time and
place. My comparison of the shifting identities of American migrants who reside in
three different metropolitan areas in Canada allows a more critical analysis of the ever-
shifting terrain of transnational identities as they are expressed in different contexts.
Data analyzed for this study were compiled from the Canadian census for the years
1961 through 2006, survey questionnaires, unstructured and structured interviews, and
on-site field work.
Keywords: transnational identity; immigration; sense of belonging; citizenship;
Canada–US borderlands

Introduction

I have developed a rich and rewarding life here in Toronto. But I feel like a giant with her two
feet straddling the border. I have a strong social, professional, and emotional life in the States,
as well as one here [in Canada]. I call myself a “split personality.” (Helen, 2009, Toronto)
Citizenship is not only the glue that accords rights and benefits. . . . It can [also] be an identity
that provides a sense of belonging. (Bloemraad 2006, 1)

In late 2007, the release of the latest census data by Statistics Canada confirmed what the
media had been predicting for many years. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first
century, there were more Americans living in Canada than at any time since the Vietnam
War years1 (see Figure 1). Although census reports, media coverage, and dinner table con-
versations have drawn attention to this increasingly large flow of Americans to Canada in
recent years, to date few scholars have documented, analyzed, or theorized the migration,
settlement patterns, identities, and sense of belonging of this relatively large group of
immigrants.2 Research conducted for the study reported on in this article helps fill this
large gap in the scholarly literature on international migration at the Canadian–US border-
lands. Of particular interest is documenting and analyzing how a seemingly benign polit-
ical border continues to resonate in the lives and landscapes of international migrants,
especially that border’s role in shaping their transnational identities.

ISSN 0272-2011 print/ISSN 1943-9954 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02722010903536953
http://www.informaworld.com
 American Review of Canadian Studies 87
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Figure 1. American immigrants in Canada, 1961–2006.

The following three interrelated questions about the migration decision-making, settle-
ment patterns, and identities of Americans in Canada guided this study: (1) Why did rela-
tively large numbers of Americans migrate to Canada from the United States, especially
between the Vietnam War and the Homeland Security eras? (2) What push–pull factors
helped shape the patterns of US migration flows in time and space in three comparative
metropolitan areas in Canada? (3) How do the differing locales and times of arrival of US
immigrants in Canada play a role in the construction of their national and transnational
identities, citizenships, and sense of belonging to Canada?

Theoretical underpinnings, methods, and approaches

Work by anthropologists Caroline Brettell and Carolyn Sargent (2008) and other scholars
in a wide variety of fields has raised a series of intriguing questions about relationships
between and among an immigrant’s sense of belonging, of identity, and of citizenship –
see, for example, the work of Guntram and Kaplan (2008), Escobar (2004), Robins and
Aksoy (2001), and Hall (2002). Findings from the Brettell and Sargent study indicate that
certain groups of immigrants may have choices about maintaining or rejecting ongoing
ties with their homeland. These choices may be political (e.g., becoming dual citizens and
maintaining flexible citizenship); economic (e.g., sending remittances home, participating
in global labor networks); cultural (e.g., making visits to ethnic heritage sites and ethnic
festivals); and/or religious (e.g., participating in a spiritual practice that is a combination
of “here” and “there”). Each of these choices, operating either individually or in tandem,
may result in differing levels of immigrant transnationality in time and place.
Identity and other related migration processes also may be shaped by the larger con-
text of conditions in the sending country, the characteristics and events that happen during
the journey in between, and the economic, political, and cultural context of the receiving
 88 S.W. Hardwick

society. Of particular note are ways in which the characteristics of particular places help
shape individual and group decision-making. Although transmigrants are often described
in spatially interwoven terms as migrants who live in two worlds at the same time, in order
to find ways to survive or even thrive in their new lives they are forced to make decisions
and produce actions in their new locales. Therefore, while past lives and decisions may
continue to shadow migrants (e.g., during periods of military unrest or economic duress at
home), most must focus their energies on finding ways to survive economically and adjust
to their new place of residence, especially in the earliest years of resettlement.
A suite of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed in this study to help
uncover some of the processes involved in constructing a sense of belonging, of identity,
and of citizenship for US immigrants in Canada. First, a national-scale cartographic ana-
lysis was completed based on Canadian census data tabulated between 1961 and 2006 to
document the location patterns of US-born residents in Canada at different time periods
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and in different places. These comparative maps laid a foundation for the distribution of
online and on-site survey questionnaires to US immigrants living in three carefully
selected Canadian metropolitan areas: Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax. I also conducted
on-site and telephone interviews using a snowball sampling technique that involved a mix
of genders, ages, socioeconomic classes, and levels of education with a total of 87 American
immigrants in the three target cities of this project. Information gathered during interviews
with Americans in each study site helped validate and humanize cartographic and survey
data and deepen my understanding of the many nuanced expressions of transnationality
expressed by this little-studied immigrant group.
To clarify some of the impacts of place, space, and time on international migrants
residing in different locales, this article begins with a discussion of the larger spatial,
social, and historical contexts of American migration to Canada. I then turn my attention
to the comparative stories of selected groups of US migrants residing in the Toronto, Van-
couver, and Halifax metropolitan areas. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the
citizenship(s) and sense of belonging of this group of what I call “fuzzy transnational
migrants.” The article concludes with some predictions about the future patterns of these
new Canadians and suggestions for future research on related topics.

Americans in Canada: Historical context

Canada has a long history of welcoming dissenters and other immigrants from the United
States (see Figure 2) and other nations. As Vic Satzewich and Lloyd Wong (2006) have
pointed out, there are deep historical roots to American emigration to Canada, beginning
with the United Empire Loyalists who headed north during and after the Revolutionary
War. Incoming waves of Loyalists swamped some parts of British North America, espe-
cially Ontario and the Maritime Provinces (Bow 2008, 344). As a result of this early
migration wave, classic work by Gourlay (1822) documented that at least four-fifths of the
settlers in western Ontario in the early decades of the nineteenth century were US-born.
During yet another period of social, economic, and political upheaval in the United
States – before and during the Civil War – from 30,000 to 60,000 African American slaves
escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad (Mensah 2002). As a result, there were
at least 62,000 African Americans in Canada by 1860, who arrived both as fugitives and
free men and women (Winks 1997). As discussed below, although many returned to the
United States after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, a large number of these
former slaves remained in Canada for permanent residency in search of new lives and
livelihoods in places such as Nova Scotia and southern Ontario.
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American Review of Canadian Studies

Figure 2. Pre-1920 American migration to Canada.

89

Source: Adapted from Thompson and Randall, 2002, pg 18.

 90 S.W. Hardwick

A much larger wave of white US settlers crossed the 49th parallel between 1898 and
1914, during Canada’s “Land Boom” years. Encouraged by Minister of the Interior Clif-
ford Sifton’s pro-white immigrant policies, rural residents of the northern Great Plains
states were recruited to settle the western Canadian interior. With an eye on groups he
viewed as being the “most promising” for successful agricultural settlement, Sifton admit-
ted that his open-door policy was selective and did not include “Orientals, Blacks, Jews,
southern Europeans, [and] even English city dwellers” (Hall 1981, 67–8). As a result of
these quasi-open-door policies of the Canadian government, at least a third of the more
than one million immigrants who settled in Canada from 1901 to1907 were born in the
United States (Woodsworth 1972, 24–5).
Many of the Americans who relocated to Canada during these Land Boom years were
part of the large-scale migration of religious groups, such as the Mormons, Hutterites, and
Mennonites. These spiritually defined migrants were drawn to small towns and more rural
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parts of south-eastern British Columbia, southern Alberta, and Saskatchewan in close

proximity to the US border. At the beginning of World War II, however, their lives were
severely disrupted by the Canadian War Measures Act, which prohibited entry into Canada
of “enemy aliens.” Of particular concern to the Canadian government after the passage of
this legislation were German-American Mennonites and Hutterites, many of whom were
deported back to the United States during the war because of their German ancestry. Later,
in the 1920s, other “alien” deportees included members of the pacifist Russian Doukhobor
sect. The reasons given for this treatment were perceived threats that Russian-style com-
munism might be brought into Canada by this group. As an interesting and important
aside, however, when the Canadian Communist Party was formed in 1921, none of its
founders was from the United States (Avery 1983). Nonetheless, anti-immigrant policies
first set in motion by the War Measures Act discouraged the ongoing settlement of large
groups of American migrants in the decades thereafter until the 1960s.
The largest politically motivated migration of Americans to Canada occurred from the
mid-1960s through the 1970s as a direct result of the US war in Vietnam. Most Americans
arrived in Canada as draft dodgers, deserters, or political activists who opposed the war.
Census tabulations reported by Statistics Canada for the years 1961–2006 provide evid-
ence that more women than men left the United States for Canada in almost every census
year. Interviews and surveys conducted for this study (along with the findings of political
scientist John Hagan [2000]) reveal that female migrants left the United States for many of
the same reasons that encouraged their male counterparts to relocate to Canada. These
included strong opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political and social challenges
of life in the United States. American draft dodgers, deserters, and war resisters first found
sanctuary north of the Canadian–US border in 1963. Only two years later, Canada
accepted 1700 American war “refugees” as legal immigrants. In 1969, the Canadian gov-
ernment enacted legislation allowing all US migrants legal admission to Canada without
regard to their military status (Hagan 2000, 609), thereby launching the tide of what would
grow to more than 50,000 Americans in Canada by the end of the war (Jones 2005; Hagan
2000, 2001). Many of these Vietnam War–era arrivals from the United States first found
their way to Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. As a result, the largest number of US-
born new Canadians in recorded history had established permanent residence north of the
US–Canadian border by the end of the Vietnam War in 1974.
The recruitment of academics from the United States for college and university posi-
tions in Canada’s expanding higher education system in the 1970s, along with the ongoing
arrival of corporate elites, skilled workers, and entrepreneurs, added to the number of
Americans in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Since that time, a veritable flood of new
 American Review of Canadian Studies 91

migrants from south of the 49th parallel has continued to arrive (Boswell 2008). Many
have decided to leave the United States due to acute dissatisfaction with the conservative
politics and policies of their homeland. Others have arrived in Canada as retirees from the
United States as part of the growing global gray nomad movement, or as “midlife maver-
icks” seeking new lives in the “promised land” north of the border. Still others have been
attracted by Canadian policies in support of universal health care, gay and lesbian rights,
multiculturalism, and gun control.
The map in Figure 3 provides a spatial summary of the populations and patterns of
US-born immigrants in Canadian provinces, territories, and major cities at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. By 2006, Statistics Canada reported that the highest number of
Americans had moved to Canada in over 30 years, with a 20 percent increase over the pre-
vious year and almost double the number who had arrived five years earlier (Statistics
Canada, 2001, 2006). This time period corresponds closely with the US presidential elec-
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tion of conservative candidate George W. Bush in 2000 and his subsequent reelection four
years later. Commenting on this increase, Jack Jedwab (2008, 1) reported that: “There has
been a significant increase in the past five years. The number hasn’t exceeded 10,000
since 1977. . . . During the 1970s, Canada admitted between 22,000 and 26,000 Americans
a year, most of whom were draft dodgers from the Vietnam War.”
Canadian census data summarized in Table 1 provides more detailed evidence of the
expanding numbers of Americans who have arrived in Canada since the late 1990s.

A tale of three cities

The Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax metropolitan areas were selected for this analysis
because each of these cities is home to a large number of US-born residents. These three
places were also chosen because they represent three different scales of analysis and three
dramatically different geographic locales in Canada.
Along with their unique characteristics of size and location, Toronto, Vancouver,
and Halifax also have a great deal in common in terms of their transnational connections
with the United States. All were important sites of American settlement for Vietnam
War–era war resisters and draft dodgers. In addition, in more recent years Americans
have migrated to these cities for a plethora of other reasons, including a search for
affordable health care and more liberal political policies. Still other US migrants who
live in Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax, as in other parts of Canada, represent a mix of
entrepreneurs, bankers, life insurance agents, university professors, and other business
and professional immigrants. Table 2 provides a summary of the comparative size of the
total US-born population in each of these three cities during the past three and a half
decades.

Americans in Toronto
Toronto is Canada’s most important immigrant gateway. According to the most recent
census counts, 45.7 percent of the total population of the Toronto Consolidated Metropol-
itan Area (CMA) are foreign-born (Chui, Tran, and Maheux 2006). Although the largest
groups of newcomers originated in China and India, immigrants from the United States
continue to arrive as well. Most come looking for employment opportunities, escaping
what they view as unacceptable policies and politics in the United States, or as retiring
“reverse snowbirds” seeking universal health care benefits and other social support services
and environmental amenities.
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92
S.W. Hardwick

Figure 3. US-born residents in Canada by province, territory, and metropolitan area.

Source: Statistics Canada: 2001. Profile for Canada: Provinces, Territories, Census Divisions, and Census Subdivisions, 2001.
 American Review of Canadian Studies 93

Table 1. US-born population in top Canadian provinces, 1991–2006.

Before 1991 1991–1995 1996–2000 2001–2006
Ontario 68,275 8,205 11,625 18,300
British Columbia 39,690 3865 4830 8175
Alberta 18,780 2265 2905 4370
Quebec 17,940 2100 2465 4065
New Brunswick 6565 760 565 775
Nova Scotia 6220 405 495 835
Manitoba 4875 605 570 1040
Saskatchewan 3780 365 455 825
Source: Census of Canada, Statistics Canada (2006); Jedwab (2008).
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Table 2. US-born population in Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax, 1971–2006.

Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) 1971 1991 2001 2006
Toronto 35,830 36,465 37,790 1280
Vancouver 25,685 22,685 23,070 24,775
Halifax 2595 3620 3330 3370
Source: Census of Canada, Statistics Canada (1971, 1991, 2001, 2006).

Overall, the province of Ontario is Canada’s most important destination for US immi-
grants, with British Columbia in second place. According to a recent report from Statistics
Canada following release of that agency’s latest Canadian census data, there were at least
278,140 former Americans living in Canada in 2006, with 46,575 in Toronto and 28,575
in Vancouver. Many came as corporate executives after 1975, when Canadian laws were
changed to permit US firms to open branch offices in Toronto and elsewhere in the nation.
Thereafter, many American-owned and -operated companies (such as City Bank, Bank of
America, J.P. Morgan, and Security Pacific) sent teams of US administrators to open and
manage branch offices in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada.
The arrival of these well-educated and economically viable Americans was a direct
response to Canada’s booming economy during this time period. Canadian expansion in
the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the business and academic worlds, created an unprece-
dented number of jobs, both for native-born Canadians and for immigrants. According to
Gonick (1975, 117):

While the investment boom began in 1963, it had reached its peak in 1965 and 1966. . . .
[V]ast expansions . . . occurred in housing, schools, universities, roads, hospitals, and the like.
By 1966, total investment absorbed one dollar for every four dollars of incomes. . . .
[B]etween 1966 and 1970, wages and salaries rose by 46 percent.

Tens of thousands of new immigrants seeking Canada’s employment opportunities and

higher salaries arrived during these boom years. Most came from the United States and
Britain. At the time of the 1961 census, US-born employees made up only 13 percent of
all professional-class employees. By 1971, their numbers had risen to 21 percent, and then
to 28 percent of professionals by 1981 (Harvey 1991, 278). These business leaders and
entrepreneurs joined other former Americans who had arrived during earlier waves of set-
tlement in the city as war protesters, university professors, political exiles, and retirees.
 94 S.W. Hardwick
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Figure 4. US immigrants in Canada: household income, 2001.

Members of Toronto’s American population overall (as in most other Canadian cities)
earn higher salaries and are more highly educated than other immigrant groups (Jansen
and Lam 2003). As shown in Figure 4, the majority of US immigrants falls into the higher
income categories, with more than 13 percent earning $120,000 or more. The high salaries
and comfortable lifestyles of many of the corporate elites who live in Toronto are one of
the major reasons why these numbers are so high in census reports. According to a
Toronto interviewee who recently retired after a long career heading up a US banking firm
in Toronto:

[we] moved up here with J.P. Morgan in the late 1970s because Toronto is the financial cap-
ital of Canada. A lot of other people have moved out to the suburbs since then, but we still
live right downtown in a large four bedroom house near the ballet, opera, and shopping.

This interviewee’s spouse currently is the president of the American Women’s Club of
Toronto. During an interview for this project, she recalled their family’s decision to leave
the United States in the 1970s, when their son was in high school, and noted the anti-
American attitudes they faced in Toronto:

Those were the Trudeau years and everyone was pretty down on Americans then. In fact, we
were blamed for just about everything. This was a tremendous era of bad feelings about
people from the US because of all the Canadian national feelings then. It really hasn’t
changed much now, at least here in Toronto. But we can’t go back home because we couldn’t
possibly afford the health care costs in the United States now.

This interviewee’s membership in the American Women’s Club of Toronto represents

only one of many social, business, and civic organizations in support of US immigrants in
Toronto today. A cursory list includes the American Legion, American Chamber of Com-
merce, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and various US-based alumni
organizations with members who graduated from US universities such as Harvard and
Yale.
The membership of these and other US organizations in Toronto is made up of Americans
who represent diverse backgrounds and different times of arrival in Canada. A large
 American Review of Canadian Studies 95

number came from the 1960s through the 1980s as teachers and university professors.
Harvey (1991, 286) calculated that:

Between 1962 and 1980, the U.S. was the primary external source of teachers for Canada. . . .
But it was at the university level that the increases were sharpest and the U.S. proportion most
impressive. A mere 3 percent of all U.S.-born teachers in 1921, university professors made up
43 percent of all American immigrant teachers during this period . . . [and they totaled] 9,634
. . . 47 percent of all professors.

The expansion of university teaching positions in Canada was part of the nation’s expand-
ing economy during this time period. It also reflected the increasing number of institutions
of higher education in Canada, as in the United States, that needed to accommodate the
large number of post-war “baby boom” students seeking college and university degrees.
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According to Harvey (1991), most of these educators from the United States were special-
ists in the humanities and social science disciplines.
This influx of American university professors, teachers, senior managers, and corpor-
ate elites after the 1960s no doubt contributed to recent findings by Jansen and Lam
(2003) that US-born immigrants in Toronto are the most educated of all immigrant groups.
Not surprisingly, Americans in Toronto also continue to be significantly overrepresented
in the number of professional-class immigrants in the city.
In sum, American immigrants in Toronto arrived for a variety of reasons. Most shared
one commonality, however – their mixed feelings related to identifying with “being an
American” or “being a Canadian.” According to a typical survey respondent who moved
to Toronto to escape army duty during the early years of the Vietnam War:

I always felt like a Canadian from the first day I lived here. It was such a relief to be in a place
that had respect for my same values and politics after years of feeling estranged from my own
country in the US.

Comparatively, another Toronto interviewee claimed more of a lingering attachment to

the United States than to her current home in Canada:

I moved to Canada with my husband and thus didn’t really ever feel I had much of a voice in
the decision to leave the US. I mean, I am grateful to Canada for all it represents but I still feel
like a loyal American much of the time. Even though all three of my kids were born here in
Toronto and are proud Canadians, I still feel attached to my memories of Wisconsin in a lot of
ways.

Americans in Vancouver
During the US war in Vietnam, the cities of Toronto and Vancouver both emerged as early
focal points for US war resister migrant settlement in Canada (Hardwick and Mansfield
2009; Jones 2005; Hagan 2001). It is estimated that at least 40 percent of the American
men who dodged the military draft during the Vietnam War now reside in British Columbia.
Many live in the Vancouver metropolitan area. Others reside in south-eastern British
Columbia, especially in the small town of Nelson and other parts of the Kootenay Mountain
region, and on Vancouver Island. Despite former US President Jimmy Carter’s declaration
of amnesty for draft dodgers in 1977, at least half of those who left the United States
during this time period remained to become a permanent part of the economic and social
fabric of British Columbia and other parts of Canada.
 96 S.W. Hardwick

As mentioned above, more women than men left the United States for Vancouver and
other parts of Canada during the Vietnam era. Census data documenting the number of US
migrants in British Columbia during the past 40 years by gender provides evidence that
women outnumbered men in most census years (Statistics Canada 1961, 1971, 1981,
1991, 2001). Many came on their own as war protesters, civil rights activists, students, and
teachers. Others arrived with their husbands, seeking new and better lives for their families
north of the border. One of these long-term US migrants in Vancouver is a 65-year-old
African American woman from Minneapolis who relocated to the city with her husband
during the Vietnam War:

We felt that we had made the best possible decision to leave the US considering the politics
and existing war. I feel that some of the lifestyle opportunities I/we experienced . . . in Canada
. . . would not have been available to us as a mixed heritage couple had we been living in the
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United States.

In recent years, political refugees who escaped the current US war in Iraq and
Afghanistan also have added to the mix of politically motivated Americans living in
Vancouver and other parts of Canada. It is estimated that there are now approximately
200 Iraq War deserters living in Canada. Many were attracted to Vancouver and other
parts of British Columbia by its reputation as Canada’s most liberal city and province.
Unlike US citizens who were given permission to stay during the Vietnam era, however, a
few of these more recent deserters have already been caught and arrested by Immigration
Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency on grounds of being in the country ille-
gally. Most face deportation to the United States for trial and, for some, a long sentence in
an American military prison.
In an attempt to ease the situation for deportees and their families, Canada’s House of
Commons adopted a motion calling on the government to stop deportation proceedings
against US army deserters. This 2008 non-binding resolution passed by a 137–110 vote to
encourage the government to allow conscientious objectors to apply for permanent resi-
dent status and remain in Canada. However, despite this resolution and the efforts of the
War Resisters Support Group and other anti-war organizations, five US army deserters
and their families were deported by the Canadian government in 2008.
Vancouver and other parts of British Columbia have also become an increasingly
important settlement destination for retirees from the United States. The US Consulate in
Vancouver estimates that there are now at least 250,000 US citizens living in British
Columbia. Many have selected Vancouver due to its booming real estate market and the
area’s many environmental, economic, and cultural amenities, and they typically report
feeling at home in Canada. According to a 70-year-old male interviewee who moved to a
Vancouver suburb three years ago:

When I pulled out of our driveway in the Bay Area, I was already looking forward to my
whole new life as a Canadian. But my children were really worried about me for the first year
or so because of my angry feelings of disappointment about the US. I moved up here during
the Bush years, you know? So I had lots of negative energy going at the time.

Other migrants from southern California and other parts of the United States have been
attracted to Vancouver’s film industry and trendy cultural scene since the late 1990s. Just
north of the famed Lions Gate Bridge in North Vancouver, for example, actor Goldie
Hawn and other Hollywood actors and musicians have purchased homes in the hills over-
looking the rugged Pacific Ocean. These and other Americans from the arts and music
 American Review of Canadian Studies 97

scene have continued to add to the cultural vitality of this cosmopolitan city in recent
years, bringing their values and economic contributions to the local economy with them.

Americans in Halifax
Despite its smaller size and peripheral location, Nova Scotia’s largest city of Halifax also
has a long and rich history of American settlement. Recently, Halifax has also become an
important settlement site for other groups of immigrants from outside North America.
According to recent Canadian census reports, slightly more than half of the foreign-born
newcomers in Halifax came from Asia in 2006, with the second-largest group originating
in the United States (see Chui, Tran, and Maheux 2006). Beginning with the arrival of
Loyalists who left the United States during and after the Revolutionary Wars (to assert and
sustain their loyalty to England) and continuing to the present day, the coastal city of Halifax
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has continued to be a magnet for US-born settlers.

The earliest African Americans to settle in Canada were slaves brought to Halifax by
white Loyalists from the New England states (Clairmont and McGill 1970). According to
James Walker (1980), Halifax soon became the center of black Loyalist settlement because
of these early arrivals. Many thereafter provided support for the British war effort as sol-
diers, guides, spies, buglers, and general laborers, with some forced to ultimately find work
as tenant farmers, laborers, domestic servants and sharecroppers for economic survival in the
post-Revolutionary War years (Mensah 2002, 46). A larger group of about 3600 African
American slaves was brought to Nova Scotia in 1815 for protection, with the majority set-
tling in Halifax (Krauter and Davis 1978). An African American settlement near Halifax
known as Africville was constructed in the early 1840s by former slaves (Boyko 1998). Less
than two decades later, another significant wave of slaves from the United States arrived in
Nova Scotia via the Underground Railroad. This migration flow was a direct result of Can-
ada’s becoming well known as a safe haven for slaves after passage of the Canadian Aboli-
tion Act in 1793 (Lampkin 1985). Geographer Joseph Mensah (2002, 90) provides this
summary of the settlement patterns of the descendents of these early African Americans in
Halifax today: “Blacks constitute the most visible . . . of the visible minorities in Halifax . . .
where the majority (66.3%) of Blacks [in Nova Scotia] live. Of the city’s 329,750 residents,
some 22,320 are visible minorities out of which 12,000 (more than half) are Blacks.”
White migrants from the United States also settled in Halifax as Loyalists during and
after the Revolutionary War and have continued to arrive since that time. Many of the
most recent arrivals from the States are relatively affluent and well educated. Some are
“midlife mavericks,” such as Jo Davenport, who moved to Halifax from Georgia in 2001.
Davenport cites political reasons for her move, especially disagreement with the US gov-
ernment’s decisions and actions following the events of 9/11; she asserts: “In addition to
universal health care, inexpensive prescription drugs and the last stretch of affordable
oceanfront real estate in North America, Nova Scotia has the picturesque charm of historic
New England” (Townsend 2005).
Another wave of Americans arrived in Halifax for spiritual reasons. This group origi-
nated in Boulder, Colorado, as followers of Tibetan Buddhist monk Chogyam Trungpa
Rimpoche. This spiritual leader selected Nova Scotia to be the world headquarters of his
religious organization in the late 1970s. According to Swick (1996, 11), Halifax was a
most unusual place for American Buddhists to settle at the time:

In 1977, the province was most famous for being provincial. A loyal outpost of the British
Empire, it was a proud bastion of Victorian values and Christian faith. . . . Old money ruled,
 98 S.W. Hardwick

and little changed. Generations of poverty made mistrust of outsiders key to the provincial
character . . . [thus] Nova Scotians were leery of an influx of newcomers professing a “foreign
religion.”

Despite the locational, economic, cultural, and climatic challenges posed by Rimpoche’s
decision to relocate his religious sect to far north-eastern Canada, the first group of American
Buddhists arrived in Nova Scotia in 1979. Today there are approximately 500 Tibetan
Buddhists from the United States residing in Halifax and the surrounding area. Many are
members of the Shambhala Community, a meditation practice also founded by Rimpoche.
These former Americans have been joined by several hundred other Buddhist seekers who
have migrated to Halifax from Europe and other parts of Canada in recent years (Swick
1996, 15–16). These newcomers have not only increased the number of Americans in
Halifax; they have also begun to transform the commercial and spiritual landscape of this
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small city as owners and patrons of espresso cafés, New Age book stores, yoga studios,
and health food stores. When one of these 1970s-era entrepreneurs was asked about his
attachment to the United States and Canada, he reported:

You asked me if I felt both American and Canadian now? Well, that’s a really hard question
since I no longer even travel to the US unless there’s a family emergency to deal with down
there. You see, I am a Canadian now and the country to the south is no longer my own. They
just don’t get me in the States because of my spiritual beliefs and my liberal political atti-
tudes, so why would I bother caring about it anymore?

Citizenship, identity, and belonging at the borderlands

How do these mixed feelings related to connections to their US homeland find expression in
the citizenship of Americans in Canada? First, it is important to note that Canadian citizen-
ship, unlike citizenship in the United States, is not a requirement to receive government social
and economic benefits (Bloemraad 2006, 3). This may be one of the primary reasons why
Satzewich and Wong (2006) found that while 70 percent of Americans in Canada became
Canadian citizens in the 1980s, by the late 1990s the number had dropped dramatically. A
more recent study by Jedwab (2008) documented that only a little over half of today’s
Americans in Canada have become Canadian citizens. Compared with a 78 percent Canadian
citizenship rate for all immigrants in Canada, only 56 percent of Americans had become
citizens of their new place of residence by 2006 (Jedwab 2008). This is surprising, since
Americans in Canada are allowed to hold dual citizenship, which provides them with options
based on having “an alternative country in which to live, work, and invest; an additional locus
and source of rights; and additional obligations and communal ties” (Schuck 1998, 163).
American immigrant perceptions of the relationship between Canadian citizenship and
their sense of belonging in Canada were expressed often in the individual stories gathered
during the interview phase of this project. According to Matthew, a 36-year-old former
Californian who now lives in Vancouver (2007):

It just doesn’t feel important to me to become an official Canadian citizen, at least not right
now. I have a strong sense of belonging here because I share the values, politics, and personal
belief system of my Canadian friends and co-workers, I really don’t need to become a citizen
to prove this to anybody.

Likewise, many of the respondents to the project’s survey questionnaires who had come to
Toronto in the late 1970s as corporate executives expressed an abiding desire to hold onto
 American Review of Canadian Studies 99

their American citizenship. Their reasons were quite different, however, to those of the
Vancouver resident cited above. Surveys completed by almost everyone in this group
stated a strong preference for maintaining their US citizenship for the following reason
(2009):

I never really wanted to be a Canadian, you know? That’s not why I came to Toronto. So why
would I want to apply for citizenship here? I will always be an American. This doesn’t have
anything to do with feeling like I belong here. I think of myself as a global citizen who can
live wherever I want.

The trend to hold on to their US citizenship is not unusual among American ex-patriates
worldwide. Some do choose to maintain dual citizenship to provide maximum political
and social benefits and ease of travel to their homeland. With more and more Americans
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living abroad in recent years, however, the number of US-born migrants choosing to give
up their US citizenship is increasing in Canada as elsewhere in the world, according to a
count done by the Internal Revenue Service. In 2006, at least 509 Americans worldwide
had given up their US citizenship. According to Karen Maxfield, a spokeswoman for the
American Embassy in London (where a similar trend has been noted), American immi-
grants usually take this step “because they do not have strong ties to the United States and
do not believe they will ever live there in the future” (Carvajal 2006, 1). Like others from
the United States who reside permanently in other countries, Americans in Canada
reported a variety of reasons for renouncing their US citizenship in survey and interview
data analyzed for this project. Most cited social and political concerns, especially displeas-
ure with the US government, and avoidance of dual taxation as their primary motivations.
Does making the decision to remain an American citizen (or even a dual citizen) mini-
mize Americans’ sense of belonging in Canada? According to data gathered and analyzed
from surveys and interviews conducted for this project, the answer to this question
depends on the spatial and temporal contexts of their Canadian settlement experience.
Responses to questions relating sense of belonging with the citizenship of Americans in
Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax varied by an individual migrant’s reasons for leaving the
United States and his or her time of arrival in Canada (along with other individual charac-
teristics such as gender, age, and socioeconomic status). Americans who left their home-
land during the Vietnam War era, for example, almost all held on to an abiding sense of
belonging to Canada, no matter what their citizenship decisions were over the years.
Those who arrived later as midlife mavericks, retirees, academics, entrepreneurs, or spirit-
ual seekers were much less likely to feel a clear attachment to “being Canadian,” perhaps
due to their ability to take frequent trips back to the United States and to maintain close
connections with friends and family there. Other responses to our questions were located
somewhere in between these two extremes, with those who had been in Canada longest
and who had political motivations for leaving the United States clinging most fervently to
belonging to Canada and a strong sense of “being Canadian.” Comparatively, migrants
who relocated to Canada more recently, especially those who came for economic reasons,
were more likely to hold on to their deep and abiding attachment to “being American.”
The Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey (Statistics Canada 2002) backs up these find-
ings on citizenship and sense of belonging of Americans in Canada. It verified that more
than 67 percent of respondents expressed a “very strong” sense of belonging to Canada,
with only 4.5 percent expressing a “not strong at all” sense of belonging to their new place
of residence. Clearly, a range of feelings and attitudes about transnationality continues to
be expressed by individuals within this diverse immigrant group, serving as a reminder
 100 S.W. Hardwick

that both spatial and temporal contexts play pivotal roles in the construction of migrant
identities (especially in the case of migrants who have the ability to make individual
choices about identifying with their homeland, their new site of residence, or both or
neither).

Future patterns, processes, and identities?

As Paul Gecelovsky (2007, 519) points out, Canada has become “America idealized” in
the post-9/11 world for many people in the United States. This perception and positive
image of Canada, along with overt frustrations with the politics and policies of their home-
land, have resulted in a record number of people from the United States emigrating to
Canada in recent years. Despite increasingly strict post-9/11 security measures now
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enforced at the Canada–US border (Bradbury and Turbeville 2008), as discussed in this
article more Americans left their homeland for Canada in 2006 than at any time in 30
years.
My findings on the migration experiences, spatial patterns, and relationships
between and among identity, citizenship, and belonging of Americans in Canada both
inform and confuse earlier arguments related to the transnational identity of Americans
in Canada (Satzewich and Wong 2006; Wong 2002). The results of this study serve as a
cautionary reminder that immigrant groups who have choices related to whether or not
to cling to dual identities and dual lives that exist both “here” and “there” (because of
individual characteristics such as skin color or socioeconomic class) may choose to
become citizens of their new place of residence or primarily foster and maintain an
identity tied to their homeland. Attempting to prove that an entire immigrant group is
“transnational” (or not) treads on dangerous ground, given that the spatial and temporal
context of individual decision-making creates different levels of transnationality for
individual immigrants.
These findings also indicate that the experiences and identities of American
migrants who reside in locales other than Canada (and who may have left the United
States during different time periods than those discussed here) provide additional rich
sites for migration stories that remain to be told. Until more evidence is gathered from
additional work with these still unstudied groups, especially those who reside in periph-
eral places, a long list of lingering questions remains. What are the implications of race,
ethnicity, and gender on migrant bonds to home and participation in transnational net-
works? How can relationships between and among these and other variables be docu-
mented and interpreted to provide a more nuanced view of the immigrant experience?
And how do the migration pathways and identities of foreign-born residents of the cities
studied for this article compare with the patterns and processes shaping peoples and
places elsewhere? The answers to these and other, related questions offer fertile ground
for understanding more about some of the reasons people move, the choices they make
about maintaining old identities or embracing new ones, and the impacts of time, place,
and process on a world in motion.

Acknowledgments
Funding needed to complete the fieldwork for this article was provided by the generous support of a
Canadian Embassy Faculty Research Grant. I also appreciated the invaluable research assistance of
Rebecca Marcus and Derek Miller and the cartographic support of the InfoGraphics Laboratory at
the University of Oregon.
 American Review of Canadian Studies 101

Notes
1. Note that the term “American” is used in this article to refer to US-born residents of Canada.
I am aware that this term also refers to all residents of both North and South America and
thus could be viewed as inappropriate here. However, because Canadians refer only to
migrants from the United States as “Americans,” the term is appropriate for use in this par-
ticular study.
2. Despite the dearth of recent work on Americans in Canada, studies abound on their histori-
cal settlement – see, for example, the seminal work of Randy Widdis (1997a, 1997b) on
Americans at the borderlands and Canadian identity, and his article on US immigration to
Saskatchewan, and David Harvey’s (1991) book, Americans in Canada. The Vietnam War-
era migration of American war resisters, draft dodgers, and political activists in Canada has
also been well documented by scholars such as John Hagan (2000, 2001), Joseph Jones
(2005), Renee Kasinsky (1976), and James Dickerson (1999). However, much less has
been said about the current wave of Americans in Canada, other than a web-based article by
Audrey Kobayashi and Brian Ray (2005), “Placing American emigration to Canada in con-
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text,” and Vic Satzewich and Lloyd Wong’s (2006) book, Transnational identities in Canada.
For this article, I also gained valuable insights from Heather Nicol’s work on Canada–US
borderlands issues, especially her 2005 article “Resiliency or change: The contemporary
Canada–U.S. border,” and Brian Bow’s “Anti-Americanism in Canada: Before and after
Iraq,” published in 2008.

Notes on contributor
Susan W. Hardwick is a Professor of Geography at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses
on immigration, identity, and place in the American and Canadian West. She is the author or co-
author of nine books, including The Geography of North America: Environment, Political Economy,
and Culture, published by Prentice Hall in 2008.

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