TORONTO – The Canadian main immigration website crashed early on Wednesday, November 9, while New Zealand reported increased traffic to its website for residency visas from US nationals in the hours before Donald Trump surged to victory in the US presidential election.
The official website for Citizen and Immigration Canada stopped working, giving an indication of a huge number of American citizens looking for a chance to leave the country as the results of the presidential race come in, Reuters reported.
The site usually offers ways of applying to live in or become a citizen of the country, but those rushing for any exit have been left disappointed by an error message.
When clicked, the page appears to take a long time to load before redirecting to a white page that reads: “Connection reset by peer.”
Canada’s official Twitter account appeared to reference the US election result in a tweet posted just as it became clear that Trump was about to win the race for the White House.
“In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens,” Canada official Twitter account posted early on Wednesday.
In New Zealand, immigration officials told Reuters on the eve of the vote that New Zealand Now website, which deals with residency and student visas, had received 1,593 registrations from U.S. citizens since Nov. 1 – more than 50 per cent of a typical month’s registrations in just seven days.
Visits to New Zealand Now from the US were up almost 80 per cent to 41,000 from October 7 to November 7, compared with the same period last year.
“I’ve got lots of messages coming through at the moment asking for a job in New Zealand, and we’re saying ‘yes you can’,” Rod Drury, the chief executive of NZ-based global accounting software firm Xero, told Reuters by telephone on Wednesday.
“It will be interesting to see whether it translates into real action, it’s an active conversation that moved to getting more serious and we’ll see what will happen in the next month.”