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By Ellen Huet and Gerrit De Vynck

November 17, 2016 at 11:57 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the November 21, 2016 issue of businessweek.

Before the election, Nicole Manion and her boss joked about whether a Donald Trump victory would mean she’d have to leave her tech job in Seattle and go home to Toronto. The ribbing has stopped.

The future of Manion, an analyst for a marketing-software company, is suddenly in jeopardy. She works in the U.S. on a special visa for Canadians and Mexicans that owes its existence to NAFTA, the continental free-trade deal the president-elect has threatened to “rip up.” “To move here was always a dream of mine,” she says. “I always saw the States as that big brother, the land of opportunity, especially in tech. Do I go back to Toronto and start again, try and rebuild what I’ve accomplished here? Or do I stay and run the risk?”