Here’s evidence from 2025. 2026 has increased.

https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/Resources-American-S...

US citizen moves to Canada on a CUSMA visa:

  - 30-50% pay cut

  - points and lottery based immigration system that penalizes them for each year you age after 30

  - frequent unfavorable rule changes

  - fear of being trapped forever on a temporary visa and eventually sent back to the USA, poorer than their peers who stayed stateside.

  - huge pay raise

  - retire back home wealthier than their peers and still enjoy socialized healthcare.

Personally, I would go to Toronto. Decades ago I used to work for a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto and had development offices in the states. There was a project I needed to do with a distinguished engineer that required me to move to Toronto for a few months. I really liked it. TBH, there are very few cities in the US that I would say are on par with Toronto, and none are better. Now the Winters are brutal, but they're brutal where I'm from so that's not a dealbreaker for me.

For a country that has been a "brain magnet" for a good century, a "brain drain" might just be "talented people from wherever choosing to go somewhere else".

Case in point: an EE I know who is finishing his master's[1] is considering interesting proposals from solid (but not top tier, think Texas not Massachusetts) universities from the US, Germany and China. While he's afraid of the culture gap with China, it's clearly the one that has the more interesting things going on technically and the one he feels more excited about

[1]Engineering by itself is a bachelor's level degree here

Probably more that China is producing more new talent through education, and Chinese scientists and researchers moving back to China.

you wouldn't want citizenship anyway; safer to remain a foreigner while living/working there, even long-term

HK will give you right of abode which is almost as good as citizenship so long as you stay in HK. I suppose you could still be deported for high crimes or some such but that almost seems like the best case scenario if that happens.

Higher intangible quality of life, lower spending power.

There are a lot of QOL advantages to living in a less violent, less polarized, less cruelty-driven society that isn't actively trying to dismantle all of its institutions and destroy itself. Especially if you're one of those people who are in the crosshairs of jack-booted thugs and their cheerleaders.

But where on the planet are you going to go and escape that?

And yet despite their majority, Labor still seem reticent to make big changes of the sort people are asking for, and backpedal on their initiatives and promises all over the place.

God I hope Pauline and one nation are just a stupid blip and that poll that put them ahead is a mirage though. She's doing the same bullshit playbook as the UK and US - 'elites' are destroying Australia by driving immigration! Meanwhile the richest woman in Australia is in the background holding the marionette's strings.