Talk of emigration and immigration have taken on heightened immediacy for my wife and I. We live half of each year in Mexico and half in Canada. We’re not immigrants, not even fully ex-pats, we simply stay in Mexico for as long as the country allows. The next step seems to be permanent residency. Many of our American and Canadian friends here have taken that step; many more are expected to join them following the 2024 election in the United States and the 2025 election in Canada. Our city in Mexico could overflow with self-imposed political exiles.
One friend recently asked me if Canada would accept an influx of Americans if Donald Trump becomes the next U.S. president. “Or would you build a wall?” I replied that Canada has a history of welcoming like-minded immigrants, from United Empire Loyalists to anti-Vietnam-War draft dodgers, and we would welcome anti-Trumpers in the same spirit. But in the back of my mind, I was thinking that if Poilievre’s Conservative Party (PCP) becomes the next government of Canada, Americans might find the country north of their border not much different from their own.
Then the discussion turned to why people live where they do. Do we choose to live where we live, or do we just wake up one day living there?
In Ann Patchett’s novel The Magician’s Assistant, the eponymous character Sabine, a Californian visiting her late husband’s relatives in Nebraska, in mid-winter, wonders how anyone came to be living there. “Had their cars broken down? Had they spoken to a stranger in a restaurant and stayed to find out more? Had they come here to visit someone [as she had], some relative so distant that the blood ties were all but untraceable and then somehow just fell into a habit?”
It strikes me that most of us live where we live almost by chance. We move to a place because there is work there, or to be closer to family members, or for reasons of health. I moved to Kingston, Ontario, to take a job at Harrowsmith magazine. We have friends who moved to Vancouver Island because their daughter was working in Nanaimo. Other friends moved from small towns to cities to be closer to doctors and hospitals. Many of our ex-pat friends in Mexico came for a holiday, fell in love with the place, and came back as soon as they could disentangle themselves from elsewhere. I don’t know anyone who actually sat down one day and said they would like to live in a certain place for no particular reason other than that they liked the sound of it, and then packed up and moved there.
Immigration follows a similar serendipitous pattern. People immigrate for many reasons, usually in order to improve their living conditions, to leave a country that is impoverished or has become politically dangerous, or to go somewhere where the prospects of living without fear and earning a decent living are better. But they don’t always choose where they go. And they don’t always like where they end up. From our house in San Miguel, we can hear, almost nightly, the mournful whistle of La Bestia, the freight train that carries hundreds of migrantes on its roof from Central America to the U.S. border. Most of them won’t like what they find when they get there, the American Dream being dreamt more in Guatemala than it is in the United States, but most of them will stay anyway.
Many immigrants experience post-immigration regrets, a topic explored by Edward Said, whose book Orientialism is the foundational text of postcolonialism. Said, himself an exile from his native Jerusalem to the United States (he held that both Israel and Palestine deserved self-determination), has written that ex-pats often live with a kind of double-vision in which experiences in their new country are superimposed like a palimpsest on memories of their old, resulting in a “crippling sorrow of estrangement.” They may even resist integration into their new societies. “Exiles look at non-exiles with resentment,” he wrote. “They [non-exiles] belong in their surroundings, you feel, whereas an exile is always out of place.”
In Alice Munro’s short story “The View from Castle Rock,” which takes place in the early 1800s, a family from Scotland is emigrating to Canada. Even before boarding the ship that will take them to Canada, Old James, the patriarch of the clan, has doubts: “Oh, that ever we left our native land,” he sighs. And upon their arrival in Quebec, he “begins to lament openly, ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’”
Ann Patchett reflects Old James’s doubts in The Magician’s Assistant, when she writes that people stayed on in Alliance, Nebraska, even though they longed to leave: “They missed the beautiful places they were from. They missed the indigenous flowers…, their families, and still, they did not know how to go.”
A few do go back. According to the Institute of Canadian Citizenship, some immigrants to Canada return to their homelands every year. Reuters reports that in Canada, “reverse immigration” peaked in 2019, that in 2021, 85,927 immigrants returned to their native countries, and in 2023, it was 42,000. Reuters somehow contrives to call this “a steady rise in emigration,” but the fact is that with the total number of immigrants to Canada during those years topping a million, it’s clear that most new arrivals stay, even if some feel, like Edward Said, the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
Such are our musings as the world crumbles around us. In Patchett’s novel, Sabine longs for the warmth of California and plans to go back there, but when the novel ends she is still in Nebraska. Like Old James and Edward Said, her head is in one location even as her feet take root in another. But if my wife and I pulled up stakes in Canada and moved to Mexico, it would be a decision, not happenstance. The friend who asked me if Canada would build a wall to keep out disaffected Americans told me she moved to San Miguel for the colour; she’d lived for many years in a desert, and she “wanted to live somewhere that wasn’t black and white.” Nothing in Mexico is black and white, Conservative or Liberal, Republican or Democrat. Things are deliciously nuanced here. If the devil is in the details, the details here are obscure. Nietzsche spoke of “that art of nuance” in which not everything is either/or. We come to that realization later in life, he believed, when we are able to see beyond good and evil. Increasingly, Mexico seems the perfect setting for that.
My immigration story was quite intentional. The night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, I made the decision to leave the US. I had 2 requirements: that the country I moved to spoke English and that it wasn't too far from my birth family in California. That spelled Canada, of course, a country I knew next to nothing about, but for a Canadian co-worker in an insurance company. I liked her, and she represented, for me, all Canadians. When another co-worker started grumbling about "socialism" over Medicare, this Canadian representative responded, "Don't be so American!" I was so impressed.
I'm pleased to report that I'm now a very happy Canadian. And however destructive a conservative government might be, I can't imagine that it would be a government that refuses to leave office if voted out — or is there something I don't know? :-)