Why did we move from Canada to the US?

Like many couples from our generation, we are college sweethearts. We first met in 2008 at university in Canada, but unlike many of our friends, we didn’t stay in Canada after graduation. Around our senior year, we thought about the possibilities of relocating elsewhere and we had a few different places in mind. We even tried to live in China for a while (that would be a blog for another day), but ultimately we decided on moving to the US for graduate schools and call America our forever home.

America is not a perfect country, and it’s not an easy place to settle down. But we found it perfect for our family and despite all the hardships we faced earlier on, we feel good about our decision a decade ago

I recently got a lot of DMs on Instagram asking me what made us move from Canada to the US and how has our experience been. So here is our story, and I hope it helps you if you are in the mid of making that important decision.

First of all, Canada and the US are both great countries that attract a lot of immigrants every year. We have a lot of respect for both places and don’t want this blog post to be misunderstood as if we dislike Canada. We love Canada.

For us, the predominate reason behind our move is access to opportunities. People who have not lived in both countries tend to think Canada is America with universal healthcare. That is not exactly true. From my personal experience after having lived in both countries, there is a huge difference in access to opportunities. Whether you want to be a founder of a startup or make a living working for a big corporation, US is the place with the most investors and the largest amount of prominent companies across different industries. The last photo on this blog is a screenshot I took from a website “Howmuch.net” back in 2015—As you can see, Canada’s GDP at the time was equivalent to the single state of Texas. To put it in a different way, I’m sure you can easily think of 5 well-known American companies with a global impact in a few different sectors (I am going to give it a try—Nike, Apple, Disney, McDonald’s, and Tesla). What if I ask you to do the same with Canadian companies? In fact, in the latest ranking of global fortune 500 companies, the highest ranking Canadian company is Brookfield Asset Management (I honestly have never heard of it before despite having lived in Canada for many years), and it was ranked 117 in the world. You see my point. So for a couple of college graduates back in 2013, we chose opportunity over comfort and came to the US for graduate school.

So there you have it, that was our number one reason to move to the US from Canada. I recently heard a powerful quote from an economist (I tried to search it again on Google but can’t quite find the exact words so forgive me for butchering it a bit)— “America is the land of opportunities whether you came to this country sailing on Mayflower or crossing the Rio Grande”. And that is why we are so glad we took that one way flight 10 years ago with those 3 suitcases and a whole lot of faith.

For those who don’t know, that’s the famous Dundas Square in Toronto, Canada