Donald Trump may have a different immigration talking point since becoming the president-elect: Americans wanting to move abroad.
As emotions ran high after Trump won the presidential election on Wednesday morning, the number of Google searches to leave the country increased by 1514 per cent, according to VisaGuide.World.
From Election Day through November 6, search traffic for “immigration” related pages on its site grew by 338 per cent, as disgruntled Americans looked up where they had the best shot of moving to, the website said.
Pages with information about relocating to specific countries also gained traction. Norway was the most popular of those pages, followed by the UK, Ireland and Costa Rica.
Germany-Visa.org also saw a 336 per cent uptick in traffic for pages related to immigration, with particular interest in the country’s Opportunity Card — a residence permit that allows anyone from a country outside of the European Union to live in Germany for up to one year to find a job.
Google searches in the US for migration topics are roughly 15 times higher this week compared to the week before the presidential election.
“Moving to New Zealand from the US” was the most-searched term, with searches for the phrase up 76 times from before Trump’s victory. Similarly, “moving to Germany from the US” was 42 times more searched this last week, and searches for “Moving to the Netherlands” was searched 32 times more, the site found.
Americans most frequently searched for information about relocating to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
