What moving to the US from Canada is like

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live in a parallel universe, just try immigrating to another country.

I was born in Canada, right on the cusp between being a millennial and being "Gen Z", depending on which country's statistics you ask. Either way, I spent the first twenty two years of my life growing up in one system, one way of seeing reality, and the past four in another.

The area in which I grew up was heavily Francophone. Obviously, this means that I speak French fluently as a second language. It was normal for me to go into a shop and seamlessly switch between the two depending on who I was talking to; sometimes this would happen even with the same person! Apart from that though, I always operated under the assumption that the US wasn't that different. After all, despite the standard Canadian chagrin at hearing it, the rest of the world views us as basically the same sort of people - largely English speaking, "ruggedly individualistic", and children of the same historical circumstances. On the surface, most people would assume that a Canadian would seamlessly assimilate into American society and vice versa.

The assumption neglects the reality of culture shock. An obvious example of this in my own life is linguistic. For years, I've instinctively responded to people in French despite their looks of confusion and my ability to speak English perfectly well. On one occasion, someone replied back to me in Spanish. Going from seeing everything in both English and French to English only, or Spanish if something happens to be bilingual, is something that I've yet to fully adjust to.

On top of that, there are all the little things. For example, in much of the US it's normal to hand your debit or credit card over to the wait staff at the end of a meal, and they go ring you out somewhere else in the restaurant. This has always seemed like a perfect way to get your card skimmed, and isn't the way it works at all in Canada - they bring the machine to your table. On top of that, there's the differences in how banking works, employment law, housing, the medical system, etc. Whenever I go to do something, things tend to go the way I would expect until one or two odd details come up and throw off my expectations. It's the feeling one would get if overnight they were transported to a universe much like their own, but enough tiny details were consistently "off" to make the experience at least a little bit jarring and unsettling.

It all boils down to this surreal sensation of things being mostly the same, but just different enough to feel wrong. This isn't a negative, mind you, not really.

Because despite all this, and despite the Kafkaesque, Byzantine hell that is dealing with USCIS, I really love living in America. I have no desire to move back to Canada, and in many respects view the way we do things here as superior to the system I spent my formative years in.

However, this sensation of things being just different enough to register as wrong is an aspect that's oft missed in discussions about immigration and assimilation. I don't really pretend to have a solution to the problem beyond just attempting to integrate as best you can into your local community. I find Americans, especially rural Americans, to be a welcoming bunch who are more than willing to help even if they view you as something of an oddity. I think I'll get used to living in a parallel universe eventually, even if it is taking me longer than most people would expect.