Canadians are stealing our jobs but at the same time, we're getting the best of the gene pool to come down to the U.S.
One "eh" or "aboot" slip up and they get shipped back to Canada!She never thought she'd get married. In her own Park Slope living room. On a Friday night. Or that her mother, many miles away, would lecture her about her choice of groom: one of "them," an American. She never thought she'd have to keep so many secrets--from her family, from potential employers, from the U.S. government.
But in February, a 26-year-old woman--whose name The Observer agreed not to print--joined the ranks of illegal immigrants in New York City. She tried to look for new work, but as soon as employers saw her foreign résumé, the questions started. Last spring, marrying her American boyfriend seemed like the only way to secure legal status in the United States. Without proper documentation, she risked getting deported. Back home. To Canada.
With her blond hair and perfect English, she doesn't look like the poster child for illegal immigration. She didn't get here by scaling a wall or paying off Coyotes. But her blue eyes and slender cheek bones represent a new face in the city's immigrant population: Canadians.
Since 2000, the number of Canadians living in New York City has more than doubled to over 21,000, myself included. In Manhattan alone, we make up the eighth-largest population of foreign-born residents. And there are between 70,000 and 99,000 unauthorized Canadians nationwide, according to the Urban Institute, a research firm that estimates figures based on population surveys. Although no one tracks the number living illegally in New York, the city continues to be a draw for my northern brethren.
For the most part, Canucks "pass" as Americans. We speak the same language--just about. We watch the same television programs. We eat the same food and read the same magazines. As one young Canadian New Yorker put it, "We've already been stirred in the melting pot."
At the same time, Canadians are increasingly thinking of New York as a city that is, if not exactly hostile, definitely not home.
LAST NOVEMBER, the 26-year-old Park Sloper moved to New York to be with her boyfriend of over three years, whom she met in Montreal while the two were at college. She found a job, secured a temporary visa, and moved into his one-bedroom Park Slope apartment. The only catch? "I hated [the job] the whole time I was there," she said, "but the only reason I stayed was because I was worried about the visa situation." Four months later, she quit.
She looked for other work, but recruiters wouldn't talk to her after they learned of her situation (her visa was only valid for her former position). After a couple of weeks, she felt "like those doctors or engineers that come over from India or Pakistan or Africa, and they have to be cab drivers. Almost."
Every day she told her boyfriend that she wanted to go home, but he had just been promoted in his Wall Street job. He refused to pick up his life and move north. It seemed the only solution was marriage.
Their wedding was a small affair: the bride and groom, the Canadian maid of honor, the American best man, and a wedding officiant who had lived in both countries. Someone had moved the living room coffee table to create an open space between the leather couches, and a giant bouquet of flowers sat atop it, a gift from the bride's mother. She must have sent them express: Her daughter had only confessed to the impending marriage the day before.
"When I told her she was like, ‘Oh my God,'" she explained. "And she said, ‘When?' and I said, ‘Tomorrow,' and she was like ‘What!'" The conversation was one she had been dreading: Her mother's biggest fear is that one of her children would move to the United States. Her mother fears for her future grandchildren. One time, she cropped an American flag out of a family portrait.
"She doesn't want her grandkids being brainwashed into the American way of life," said the newlywed. She reassured her mother that her grandchildren would have dual citizenship, but her mother responded, "Well, then their kids will be American!"
MOST CANADIANS DON'T move to New York for love. We come to steal your jobs, mostly in the fields of finance, law and, to a lesser extent, the arts and media. (We call this migration "brain drain.")
Canadian New Yorkers are generally in their 20s to 40s. They are more highly skilled and wealthier than the general population in the U.S. -- and in Canada. As Mahmood Iqbal noted in a report for the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, these emigrants "are the best and brightest of the Canadian human resource pool."
It's hard for me to disagree. I was born and raised in Toronto, and I cite my northern origins with obnoxious pride, railing against the American health care system, or inquiring politely where I might find the "washroom." Sometimes I wish I had a more pronounced accent, like an Australian, if only so Americans wouldn't judge my slightly spotty cultural knowledge. (Although I have dual citizenship, I'm not familiar with the Appalachia region; I've hardly ever watched Fox News; I had no idea what servers meant by the phrase, "American cheese" -- we call it Kraft Singles.)
Part of the reason for this influx of Canadians is a class of visa that was created in 1994, when NAFTA went into effect. The Trade NAFTA (TN) visa authorizes workers from Mexico and Canada to live in the U.S. for up to one year, provided they work in one of 60 scheduled occupations. A Canadian need only prove that she has a job as a graphic designer or an accountant, show up at the border, and pay $50. She can obtain a visa on the spot.
No wonder this town's crawling with frostbacks.
The Canadian Association of New York, which organizes the ultra-glitzy Maple Leaf Ball, has 500 members. The "Canadians in NYC" Facebook group has almost 1,000. This year's Canada Day celebration, which was held at Mama's Bar in the East Village on July 1, drew twice as many people as last year. Canadians lined up around the block.
In March 2007, New York's first Canadian-themed restaurant opened. In the meatpacking district. The Inn LW12 is a self-styled "elegant British pub meets Canadian country inn." The bar menu features two kinds of poutine (that Quebecois delicacy of French fries, gravy, and cheese curds). The restaurant's décor, which includes a book shelf fashioned out of a canoe, was inspired by the cottages of the restaurant's three founders. "It's nice, though, eh?" asked Phil Jalbert, one of the co-founders.
Yet, if any person is responsible for the cultural takeover of New York, it is Jeff Breithaupt, the public affairs officer at the Canadian Consulate. Mr. Breithaupt, 45, is tall and charming, with silver at his temples. His job is to target Americans, to sell them on the idea that Canada is super. (Read all about it in their newsletter, the Upper North Side.) He insists that "the quiet invasion of the United States is not part of the goal," although in his job, he hears a lot about the northern siege. "Definitely that joke has had a lot of traction: They're here, they're all around us, the Canadian body snatchers."
FOR MANY OF US, our Canadian-ness becomes a de facto identity when living in New York. Amy Cervini, a jazz singer, told me that she mentions her nationality so often at gigs and on press releases that her Israeli husband advised her to cool it. ("They know you're Canadian after the first time you tell them!" he said.) A producer at MTV News, Matt Harper, told me that coworkers call him "Matt the Canadian," a nickname that only intensifies when he wears flannel shirts.
That sense of foreignness is no more apparent than when Canadians face the American health care system. They call it "confusing" and "terrifying."
"It's what makes you feel unwelcome," said Adam, a 23-year-old New York University student who did not want his last name used. "It's something that really reminds you that you're not in the country you were born in."
Doctors visits are fraught with unease about what will be covered and what won't -- and how much everything will cost. I make sure to let everyone at the clinic know that I'm Canadian, as if to say, "Cut me some slack, I don't get it."
Adam couldn't believe that, under his student health plan, he would have to pay for a portion of emergency health services, even if he wasn't at fault for an injury. Ms. Cervini tried to explain the notion of co-pays to her bewildered family back home, but they didn't understand. Our Canadian bride fumed about a $250 doctor's bill she received after a bad bout of the flu, and then told me: "I felt really alone."
At the same time, she doesn't consider herself an immigrant.
"I feel like when you say ‘immigrant,' it sounds like someone ... from a Third World country, coming somewhere for a better life almost. As opposed to coming from Canada, [when moving to the States] is kind of like coming to a lower standard of living."
In the past few years, security at the U.S.-Canada border has increased. In January, regulations went into effect requiring Canadians to show passports (or equivalent documentation) when crossing the border; these rules are set to become stricter in 2009. And the number of customs agents almost tripled in the five years after Sept. 11, to almost 1,000, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The changes at the border have also affected the way Canadians view their positions as foreigners, reminding them of the boundary between the two countries. "They don't want to make a mistake," said Rosanna Berardi, a Buffalo-based immigration lawyer. "They don't want to get in trouble." Ms. Berardi's practice, which specializes in Canadian emigration to the U.S., sees more clients than ever before, an increase she attributed to the rising fear Canadians have of applying for American visas. "It's a pretty hot area of practice," she said.
Adam, the N.Y.U. student, has black, curly hair and a cocky grin. I can imagine him at Toronto's Pearson International Airport last July, slapping his passport on the counter, proudly informing the customs official of his summer internship in radio journalism. He had no papers, but he also had nothing to hide; he wasn't going to get paid for his work in New York City.
It didn't matter. When Adam told border guards that he planned to intern, they escorted him to a secondary screening room. Yet, what amazed Adam was not that he was subsequently denied entry to the U.S., but that the border guards were so adversarial.
"It's not like I'm saying I can't handle this," he reassured me. "I've been to Israel, I've been through checkpoints. It was that, this is America. And they're treating me like a threat. That's what was amazing about it."
Eventually, Adam got rush service on a visa and made it to Manhattan. Yet, even after he arrived, he felt scared. When he opened a savings account and received a letter from the I.R.S. questioning his motives, he panicked. He told his parents stories about how nervous he was, how he feared "they" would come in the middle of the night. "Adam, you sound crazy," his father told him. "You really do."
As a Canadian, he wasn't used to being treated like ... an immigrant.
SO WHY DO CANADIANS continue to make New York their home? For the same reason that all newcomers touch down on American shores: opportunity. More money, more recognition, a better life -- or at least a better job. We come, in short, for the American Dream.
Yet with the American economy in a slowdown and the job market becoming increasingly competitive, it's difficult to say whether Canucks will continue to fly south. For the first time in decades, the loonie is roughly on par with the greenback, and the prospect of an inflated paycheck isn't a guarantee.
"Before all these things happened with the market," said John Moore, president of the Canadian Association of New York, "you could almost say that there was a Canadian formula, whereby people would come here, and they would earn higher salaries, live in New York City, build up a bit of a nest egg, and they would want to go back to wherever they're from in Canada, and settle there, and build their family."
And now?
The Park Slope bride, at least for one, is uncertain about the future. Her husband won't be ready to leave New York for at least another five years, but she hopes to raise her future children up north.
"He says he'll consider moving to Canada down the road," she said. "But I'm not sure that will happen or not. I told him that I really, really, really want it."
Last spring, without vows, music, or rings, the couple exchanged roses, and the officiant read an Apache blessing. "Tonight we celebrate international relations and a marriage," the officiant proclaimed.
The best man discreetly wiped a tear from his eye. We ate Magnolia cupcakes and drank champagne. The ceremony lasted about 25 minutes.
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