Americans are driving a surge in both citizenship applications in Canada and demand for archivists there to find evidence that they are eligible to become citizens, as people in the US look to leave the country increasingly defined by President Donald Trump’s racist, violent, and authoritarian far-right political movement.

As CBC reported Monday, the number of people who have received Canadian citizenship certificates rose nearly 50% between April 1-May 31, months after the country’s Parliament passed Bill C-3—the so-called “Lost Canadian” law.

The law allows foreign nationals to gain citizenship if they can prove via official genealogical records that they are descended from a Canadian ancestor. It was passed after courts struck down a previous restriction limiting citizenship eligibility to people whose parents were born in Canada.

In the first five months of 2026, Americans accounted for nearly half of the people who qualified for citizenship.

More than 3,100 Americans obtained citizenship certificates as a result of Bill C-3, and another 8,125 people from the US were granted citizenship due to their parents being Canadian.

The country’s federal immigration agency, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), reports that the backlog of citizenship certificate applications had exploded to 121,800 people at of August 10—up from 70,400 in May and 56,000 the previous month.

“There’s so many reasons that people, you know, might be looking to leave the States right now or planning for future moves."

In May, the wait time for an application being processed was estimated to be 12 months, but as of August 10, it had jumped to 25 months.

CBC noted that some certificate applicants simply need replacement documents after their citizenship papers have been lost or stolen, but one immigration attorney and policy analyst told CTV News that there is a clear driver of the surge in Americans exploring the possibility of citizenship in their neighboring country.

"Proof of citizenship used to be fast, but the Trump bump has dramatically increased the processing volumes for proof of citizenship, resulting in lengthy processing times,” Richard Kurland told the outlet last week. “What used to take a few months is now going to take well over a year and longer.”

The surge in citizenship applications comes as Trump has overseen a mass deportation campaign in which federal immigration agents have fatally shot at least 11 people on US streets, including at least three US citizens. The president’s tariff policy, his unprovoked war of choice in Iran, and the Republican Party’s cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies have all been blamed for worsening the affordability crisis that Trump campaigned on ending.

The White House has also signaled plans to ramp up attacks on the First Amendment as it pushes federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to carry out Trump’s directive from last year, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, to crack down on groups he called “radical left” extremists.

As Common Dreams reported last week, teachers unions and climate advocates were among those that the Department of Homeland Security surveilled earlier this year in Minnesota in response to widespread protests against its anti-immigration crackdown.

“There’s so many reasons that people, you know, might be looking to leave the States right now or planning for future moves," Mab Coates-Davies, executive director of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA), told the CBC Monday.

The association has seen a sharp rise in requests for archivists to find genealogical records that prove Canadian ancestry in recent months, with a majority of the requests coming from the US, according to the outlet.

Some archival institutions are seeing 100-300% jumps in requests, the ACA said.

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