You wrote:
“No political refugees have fled south from Canada to the USA.”
What do you call the Cajuns?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Expulsion
Granted, the USA was not an independent nation yet.
It was an interesting episode. I’m somewhat familiar with it as I’m Acadien. The short story is that the English governor was fed up with a few troublemakers and decreed that any resident who refused to take a loyalty oath would have to leave. Roughly half of them (including my branch of the family) took the oath and the rest set out for Louisiana. None of them considered returning to France; they came here because Bourbon France was a decrepit hell-hole.