Sean and James McQuillan left Ireland for Toronto in 2010
In the mid-1990s, companies such as Microsoft, Intel and Apple, attracted by Ireland’s well-educated workforce, tax incentives, minimal regulations and low wages, opened offices in Dublin with a speed that surprised even the gravest doubter. By the time the Celtic Tiger, as the exploding Irish economy was dubbed, had fully deployed its claws, the unemployment rate had dropped to just under five per cent, one of the lowest in the developed world. Ireland’s GDP grew to one of the highest in Europe, exports doubled in just five years, and the average income was climbing seven per cent a year, almost triple the Read the rest of this entry »
eurozone average.
The U.S. presidential race has been depressing to watch. The portrait of America that has emerged from the conventions and the debates and the attack ads is grim: a country plagued by vast unemployment and a shrinking middle class, where many average citizens can’t pay the bills. For the first time in generations, Americans anticipate their kids will never make as much money as they do. Even the flow of illegal immigrants to the U.S. is slowing; since the economy crashed in 2008, the number of Mexicans sneaking across the border has declined.
Canada’s biggest banks are basking in good news lately: 
The day after George W. Bush was re-elected president, the American novelist Richard Ford got in his car and drove across the border to Saskatchewan from Montana. He did not come in search of political asylum—something many American liberal intellectuals loudly and half-jokingly yearned for that day—but for a flu shot, which his U.S. health care provider had deemed him “not old enough or sick enough to merit.”
