Canada's main immigration website appeared to suffer repeated outages on Tuesday night as Trump took the lead in several major states and his prospects for winning the U.S. presidency turned markedly higher. In the following hours he won most of those states.
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 United States citizens since Nov. 1 ‐ more than 50 percent of a typical month’s registrations in just seven days.
Visits to New Zealand Now from the United States were up almost 80 percent to 41,000 from 7 Oct to 7 November, compared with the same period last year.
Rod Drury, the chief executive of NZ-based global accounting software firm Xero, said the statistics matched up with interest his company has been seeing from prospective U.S. national employees concerned about a Trump win.
Drury said what started as a joke was becoming a reality.