“Geez, moving to the States must be hard”

This is a follow-up from my first post on how I got my teaching-focused job, where I said I’d make a part two on moving to the US as a Canadian… well, after a long while, I finally fleshed out a bit of the stuff!

Notes from a Canadian to fellow Canadians looking to move to the US for some kind of academic job: there’s lots of weird stuff to consider. I wrote down a couple from when I first moved, and this was during peak COVID, so some of the things are not as tedious now (like getting a SSN). But as a first-timer to the US, many colleagues didn’t even have these things on their radar as things I’d have to know.

Figure out visa sponsorship. This really should be done by your institution, but can also be an indication of how much they can help you with it. Ideally, you’re on a H-1B visa, since that’s the one that can be a gateway to applying for permanent residency (i.e. the green card). If you’re in dire straits (or found yourself in a situation where the US administration has stopped giving out H-1Bs for the year like what happened in the latter half of 2020), Canadians can get TN status as a University Teacher.

If you’re predicting a move in advance, get yourself a credit card with US partnerships. Your credit standings don’t carry over into the US, so if you don’t have a bank that can help you get a US dollar credit card even before arrival, then you start building credit later. That might not immediately be a problem, but it’s certainly not convenient. I had a credit card from American Express in Canada, and they helped set up a US line of credit based on their internal knowledge of me being in good standing with them.

Get yourself a bank account that can open a US branch from abroad. Some banks will need you to open the account locally. I needed to have a US-based bank account to get my salary deposited into it, so my solution was to open a bank account through a Canadian partner (in my case, TD).

Start getting your SSN as soon as possible. Verifying your documents (you have to show up at an office to present your documents) and waiting for the card in the mail (up to two weeks) can be a pain, but at least you can start the process of applying for the social security card online now.

Link your SSN to everything as quickly as you can. This gets linked to everything - your employment, your credit scores, your driver’s license, so on and so forth. You need to build a good line of credit to get lower interest rates on larger purchases (cars, homes, etc.) and having ‘healthy’ debt here is good, which is something I guess I was just never used to. You will want to demonstrate consistent, responsible debt management in order to boost the credit score, and part of that is seeing all of your lines of credit being available but not maxed.

Secure relocation funding from your institution. It’s not cheap to move (I don’t consider myself owning a lot of stuff, and it still cost me almost $4000 to get movers to do it). If your institution wants you, they’ll want to help you move. I’d try to figure out how much is being provided so that you can plan accordingly.

I honestly didn’t think of a lot of these, but I hope that if you find yourself in my situation, this was at least a little bit helpful!