Canada by Choice is a small, family-run immigration consultancy in Windsor, Ontario. It gives legal advice to people who are interested in moving to Canada and helps them fill out the necessary paperwork to enter the country. Hussein Zarif has worked on marketing and outreach at the company for the past four years—it’s his job to find clients and connect them with the firm’s staff. The clientele come mostly from the Middle East, China, and India, and that’s where Zarif has always focussed his outreach budget, placing online ads that appear on Facebook and Google. That was before Donald Trump. Since November 8th, the firm has been flooded with calls from the U.S., and the Web site has crashed a few times because of heavy traffic. Zarif knew that Americans often threatened to move to Canada after a contentious election, but he hadn’t ever taken them seriously. “Maybe there is something behind all this,” he remembers thinking. “I’ll put some ads out and see what happens.” He used recent quotes from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a tagline for ads on Facebook and Google which ran in the U.S.: “Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.”

Zarif, who is twenty-four, and whose father runs the business, has become an unlikely expert in the anxiety currently plaguing immigrants in America. “I’m not a political person, and I don’t know the U.S. very well,” he said. He wasn’t looking to entice American citizens—in his experience, they tended to stay put. The idea, instead, was to find promising immigrants living in America who were anxious to leave. From his desk at the firm’s office, in a strip mall just across a bridge from Detroit, he started tinkering with the filters for his targeted digital ads—the ones that pop up when someone is using Facebook or Google—trying to insure that they reached the right people. His first attempts to target people based on age, language, and location brought uneven results—Americans looking to retire to Canada, immigrants with poor English-language skills. (Canada awards work visas using specific criteria, such as language skills, education, and professional experience.) Then he refined the terms further, to include anyone who had ever typed “how to immigrate to the U.S.” into Google. A few days later, he received a call from an Egyptian client in his mid-thirties, with a master’s degree, a long employment history, and a well-paying job in Detroit. He and his wife, who were raising a child, were ready to emigrate. “These weren’t the people I thought would be interested in coming to Canada,” he said. “They had status in the place where they lived. They made a hundred thousand dollars, had good jobs. These are the people who want to leave?” The man had an H-1B visa, a temporary U.S. work visa for specialty occupations in engineering, medicine, and tech. At the time, Zarif—who entrusts the legal side of the business to the firm’s experts—didn’t know what an H-1B visa was.

On the campaign trail, Trump had attacked the H-1B program, which admits eighty-five thousand people a year, claiming that companies were using it to undercut American workers. When Trump won, many expected him to take steps to curb the program. The Egyptian and his wife had decided that the uncertainty was too much. Zarif heard a similar story, a few days later, from a Pakistani living in the U.S., then from another man, who was Indian. “I started noticing a pattern,” Zarif said. “Each time, they had just the qualifications I was looking for. I thought, Wow, I can actually help them! And, each time, they told me they had this special visa called H-1B.” He went back to his ad filters and added “H-1B” to the search terms. As of this month, H-1B visa holders who live in the U.S. account for half of Canada by Choice’s clients seeking permanent residency and eighty per cent of the firm’s clients seeking a work visa—about seventy people altogether.

Foreign-exchange students, who also figure among Canada by Choice’s clients, have been reacting to Trump’s ascendancy, too. In a recent survey of two hundred and fifty American colleges and universities, forty per cent of the institutions reported a decline in applications from international students for the fall of 2017. Zarif has been fielding calls from Mexican and other Central American students who have told him they’d prefer to study in Canada because of the political climate in the U.S. Others are already in the U.S., finishing master’s-degree programs, and are newly concerned about their ability to secure jobs after graduation. The calls can get difficult. “I’m trying to be professional,” he said. “The person on the other end of the line is swearing at Donald Trump. I’m trying to keep politics out of the workplace. I try to calm them down. But I understand where they’re coming from.”

Canada by Choice is just one small shop, and it’s still too early to tell whether Trump’s Presidency will have a measurable effect on the population of legal immigrants living and working in the U.S. But the number of H-1B applications has already begun to dip. Canada, meanwhile, is becoming more attractive to high-skilled job seekers. The country is projected to create more than two hundred thousand new jobs in the tech sector by 2020, and Canadian firms have been aggressively recruiting foreigners. In the past, Canadian companies have struggled to match the salaries offered by their American counterparts, but now Canadian tech C.E.O.s are reporting an uptick in interest from immigrants who are uncomfortable staying in the U.S.

Marwan Zarif, Hussein’s father, has begun to hire more staff. Marwan, who was born in Lebanon and educated in the U.S., told me, “When I came in, the morning after the Inauguration, I couldn’t get my Web site to work. I went to the government of Canada’s Web site as well. It wasn’t working, either.” In late January, when Trump took office and was signing his first executive orders, traffic to Canada by Choice’s Web site increased from a few dozen daily visits to hundreds; it saw another spike in February. “I thought this was a temporary situation, that it would calm down in two or three weeks. But it’s constantly increasing,” Marwan said.

Last week, the Administration announced a new executive order, called “Buy American, Hire American,” which calls on government agencies to crack down on “fraud and abuse” in the H-1B visa program. On the day of the announcement, I texted Hussein Zarif, who’d seen the news earlier that morning. “It's pretty vague,” he replied. “But it will play into the fears of the visa holders right now.” Already there’d been a fresh wave of calls, and the traffic to the Web site was spiking once again.