Alright, I have a question for Americans here (would love to hear from American ex-pats, too): What’s your threshold for social regression before you actually leave the country? I don’t live in...
Alright, I have a question for Americans here (would love to hear from American ex-pats, too):
What’s your threshold for social regression before you actually leave the country?
I don’t live in Texas, or in a remotely red state, but state-run witch-hunts for families of transgender children genuinely makes my blood run cold. Enacting laws that allow prosecutors to charge women who had abortions (or, let’s be honest, miscarriages even, most likely) with murder is genuinely terrifying. The list of regressions happening now or staged for the near future is… long. And awful.
My fiancée is an Irish citizen. When we get married, I’ll be able to become one, too. We’d be able to move anywhere in the EU (honestly, Ireland is near the top of the list). But… all of our family and friends live here. We just bought a house we love. We have jobs we love. There’s so much we’d be giving up, and I just don’t know how to weigh the options.
Something to consider is that emigration is both way harder than most people think, and by far the hardest for the people it would benefit the most. Even leaving aside the cost of moving thousands...
Something to consider is that emigration is both way harder than most people think, and by far the hardest for the people it would benefit the most. Even leaving aside the cost of moving thousands of miles, without helpful personal circumstances like a spouse from your target country or an inherited bloodline citizenship, emigration to a country of similar or better standard of living than the US is almost only on the table for people already wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the effects of our ongoing social collapse.
Also for trans people specifically, to my knowledge there is at time of writing almost nowhere on Earth better to live in (pertaining to trans issues) than US blue states. Informed consent with near-zero wait times, legal protections, and I'm pretty sure even people on Medicare can access trans healthcare services without gatekeeping, which is not the case in even most of the progressive European countries. So most of the movement you see is to those parts of the country rather than abroad; anecdotally every trans person I knew growing up has left or is in the process of leaving my shitty home state for bluer pastures, and Georgia isn't even one of the worst red states.
Yeah, absolutely. I am lucky enough to have a straightforward path to citizenship in another country, and even so, the hurdles seem pretty tremendous. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that there...
emigration to a country of similar or better standard of living than the US is almost only on the table for people already wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the effects of our ongoing social collapse.
Yeah, absolutely. I am lucky enough to have a straightforward path to citizenship in another country, and even so, the hurdles seem pretty tremendous. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that there was a threshold at which anyone should leave their country, either, I’m mostly trying to understand how other folks are doing this calculus (if anyone else even is). It’s not a solution of any kind in any real sense, at least not for those most at risk.
Also for trans people specifically, to my knowledge there is at time of writing almost nowhere on Earth better to live in (pertaining to trans issues) than US blue states.
I’m glad you mentioned this. I’ll do some more research, but I’m willing to believe this is true. My state continues to make progress on many social issues; it’s what I see in other (sometimes neighboring!) states that has me most frightened/shaken/angry/etc. The decline isn’t uniform.
Frankly, if there was somewhere I was confident I'd protect my rights better and I had the money, I'd move today. This place is a shitshow. But, while I could probably get myself and maybe one of...
What’s your threshold for social regression before you actually leave the country?
Frankly, if there was somewhere I was confident I'd protect my rights better and I had the money, I'd move today. This place is a shitshow. But, while I could probably get myself and maybe one of my partners out (if I married them), I'd have to leave the most important relationships behind - and for what? Where would I go? Not the UK, certainly, nor South America nor Canada nor Germany nor Italy nor Spain. Eastern Europe will be Russia's lunch in a decade or so and I'm not permitted to enter China personally, even if they weren't violently transphobic.
So, yeah, I think the answer is both "now" and "never."
I was so surprised at the amount of British people I met working in Australia who'd left the UK for a better future there. I also think there's a reason why Scandinavia gets the good results it...
I was so surprised at the amount of British people I met working in Australia who'd left the UK for a better future there.
I also think there's a reason why Scandinavia gets the good results it does in rankings of where you're well off living.
I don't think it is particularly identifying. I'm from an academic family, and one of my parents works on articles and books about folk religion and the origins of executive power in middle and...
I don't think it is particularly identifying. I'm from an academic family, and one of my parents works on articles and books about folk religion and the origins of executive power in middle and late Imperial China - something which undermines narratives that the CCP espouses around Confucianism and the supremacy of the Communist party. Nobody from my family is likely to have a good time if we try to enter the mainland.
Most people don't have the option to decide if they want to move somewhere else. I, on the other hand, am fortunate enough to have that option and I wrestle with this question almost daily. For a...
Most people don't have the option to decide if they want to move somewhere else. I, on the other hand, am fortunate enough to have that option and I wrestle with this question almost daily. For a little background, I am a teacher and taught English abroad for a few years until the pandemic. America is an absolute shit show right now, politically, economically, and socially. When I lived abroad, I took advantage of my status as a foreigner and didn't concern myself with the social/political issues of the country I was living in. That country is far from perfect, but who am I to show up and tell people how to live? I also made significantly more money teaching and my cushy job gave me a fraction of the stress I deal with now. Overall, my quality of life was much better and I am single without kids or assets. So yeah, I think about it all the time, and part of me wants to get on the next possible flight to a country that's willing to pay a living wage to whatever dipshit is willing to teach rich kids how to speak with an American accent.
But on the other hand, there is an intense pull to stay here and do what I can to make things better. I can't really make sense of it. I think the optimistic "we can fix it" attitude is baked into the American psyche. In some ways, it's the counterbalance to the rugged individual, bootstraps-pulling attitude that is quintessentially American, but I see them more as being two sides of the same irrationally confident coin. You grow up learning this idealistic fairy tale about the founding fathers who bravely stood up to tyranny, and their long line of successors, like Lincoln and MLK, who also successfully made changes that fixed some of the flaws this country had. The way it's taught and mythologized leads one to believe that America is always improving and that the positive change you wish to see is always around the corner if you're willing to do something about it. That's objectively not true, but it's really hard to shake. So even though I know for a fact that my life would be better if I left, there is an underlying feeling of guilt for "quitting" basically.
So that's where I am at. I'm not sure if anyone else feels the same way or similar. There is definitely a "fuck this, I'm out" point but I don't know what it is yet. Hopefully, if that day comes, it won't be too late.
Yeah, I feel you. I think, for me, in addition to the practical trade-offs (it would be expensive, my particular career pays better in the US than pretty much anywhere else in the world, it would...
Yeah, I feel you. I think, for me, in addition to the practical trade-offs (it would be expensive, my particular career pays better in the US than pretty much anywhere else in the world, it would suddenly become very challenging to see my friends and family), there are definitely several moral/ethical challenges that I struggle with.
Like you said, it feels like giving up. A democracy functions through participation; we, at least nominally, make progress through collective action and education. Just up and leaving is very much the opposite of that. It feels like admitting defeat.
Relatedly, part of the reason that admitting defeat is so devastating is that I, like you, am fairly privileged to even be considering this route. I’m also privileged in several other ways, all of which contribute to my being in a position to actively consider this choice. As you say, most people in America do not have this privilege. That means admitting defeat isn’t just saying “damn, I guess it won’t get better”, it’s condemning all of those less fortunate than me to suffer through this defeat, and to do it without my support.
I don’t know what to do with that. Surely I have (and feel) an obligation to my neighbors, my community, and my country to support them and give back. But… I also know that in the not-so-distant future, I plan to have a family, and where I have that family matters! I have more power over the conditions that my children are raised in than I have over the conditions my neighbors live in; does that mean that I should wield that power to put my immediate family in a better position to live life happily and freely, even at the potential expense of removing myself from my community’s (and country’s) system of support, permanently? Do I even have a positive impact on my community now? How would I evaluate such a thing? Does it even make sense to consider this move more than the one I made last summer from a different town in a different state to our home now?
I feel like I basically can not possibly answer any of these questions. I’m also starting to think more about how I might be using them to avoid a more fundamental conversation (and thank you @spctrvl for your post, which helped solidify this for me): I’m really just afraid. What I see happening around me is people with whom I have fundamental philosophical differences coming into more and more power, and I am frightened of what they are doing with that power now, and what it suggests they might do with it in the future. And I feel a strong temptation to act from that place of fear, and I think that I might be trying to use these questions as a way of avoiding confronting that fear.
Unfortunately I still don’t really know what to do, right now, but… thank you anyway to everyone who’s participated in this conversation. Happy to keep talking about this more, too, if people are interested.
Yeah I relate to that pretty hard. While I'm not going international any time soon, I am myself in the process of abandoning Georgia for California or Washington (depending on how things shake out...
Yeah I relate to that pretty hard. While I'm not going international any time soon, I am myself in the process of abandoning Georgia for California or Washington (depending on how things shake out with work, I'll know which by August). There's good work being done in Georgia, and I'm glad I got to cast one of the few thousand votes that helped flip the state in 2020, but at the end of the day I don't want to waste the best years of my life in a state that's intersectionally hostile to like fifty different aspects of my existence. Personally I don't begrudge anybody fleeing, it just sucks that there aren't a lot of places for most people to run to.
Alright, I have a question for Americans here (would love to hear from American ex-pats, too):
What’s your threshold for social regression before you actually leave the country?
I don’t live in Texas, or in a remotely red state, but state-run witch-hunts for families of transgender children genuinely makes my blood run cold. Enacting laws that allow prosecutors to charge women who had abortions (or, let’s be honest, miscarriages even, most likely) with murder is genuinely terrifying. The list of regressions happening now or staged for the near future is… long. And awful.
My fiancée is an Irish citizen. When we get married, I’ll be able to become one, too. We’d be able to move anywhere in the EU (honestly, Ireland is near the top of the list). But… all of our family and friends live here. We just bought a house we love. We have jobs we love. There’s so much we’d be giving up, and I just don’t know how to weigh the options.
Something to consider is that emigration is both way harder than most people think, and by far the hardest for the people it would benefit the most. Even leaving aside the cost of moving thousands of miles, without helpful personal circumstances like a spouse from your target country or an inherited bloodline citizenship, emigration to a country of similar or better standard of living than the US is almost only on the table for people already wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the effects of our ongoing social collapse.
Also for trans people specifically, to my knowledge there is at time of writing almost nowhere on Earth better to live in (pertaining to trans issues) than US blue states. Informed consent with near-zero wait times, legal protections, and I'm pretty sure even people on Medicare can access trans healthcare services without gatekeeping, which is not the case in even most of the progressive European countries. So most of the movement you see is to those parts of the country rather than abroad; anecdotally every trans person I knew growing up has left or is in the process of leaving my shitty home state for bluer pastures, and Georgia isn't even one of the worst red states.
Yeah, absolutely. I am lucky enough to have a straightforward path to citizenship in another country, and even so, the hurdles seem pretty tremendous. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that there was a threshold at which anyone should leave their country, either, I’m mostly trying to understand how other folks are doing this calculus (if anyone else even is). It’s not a solution of any kind in any real sense, at least not for those most at risk.
I’m glad you mentioned this. I’ll do some more research, but I’m willing to believe this is true. My state continues to make progress on many social issues; it’s what I see in other (sometimes neighboring!) states that has me most frightened/shaken/angry/etc. The decline isn’t uniform.
Frankly, if there was somewhere I was confident I'd protect my rights better and I had the money, I'd move today. This place is a shitshow. But, while I could probably get myself and maybe one of my partners out (if I married them), I'd have to leave the most important relationships behind - and for what? Where would I go? Not the UK, certainly, nor South America nor Canada nor Germany nor Italy nor Spain. Eastern Europe will be Russia's lunch in a decade or so and I'm not permitted to enter China personally, even if they weren't violently transphobic.
So, yeah, I think the answer is both "now" and "never."
New Zealand is quickly becoming the promised land.
I was so surprised at the amount of British people I met working in Australia who'd left the UK for a better future there.
I also think there's a reason why Scandinavia gets the good results it does in rankings of where you're well off living.
If you don't mind my asking and it wouldn't be personally identifying, why aren't you permitted to enter China?
I don't think it is particularly identifying. I'm from an academic family, and one of my parents works on articles and books about folk religion and the origins of executive power in middle and late Imperial China - something which undermines narratives that the CCP espouses around Confucianism and the supremacy of the Communist party. Nobody from my family is likely to have a good time if we try to enter the mainland.
Most people don't have the option to decide if they want to move somewhere else. I, on the other hand, am fortunate enough to have that option and I wrestle with this question almost daily. For a little background, I am a teacher and taught English abroad for a few years until the pandemic. America is an absolute shit show right now, politically, economically, and socially. When I lived abroad, I took advantage of my status as a foreigner and didn't concern myself with the social/political issues of the country I was living in. That country is far from perfect, but who am I to show up and tell people how to live? I also made significantly more money teaching and my cushy job gave me a fraction of the stress I deal with now. Overall, my quality of life was much better and I am single without kids or assets. So yeah, I think about it all the time, and part of me wants to get on the next possible flight to a country that's willing to pay a living wage to whatever dipshit is willing to teach rich kids how to speak with an American accent.
But on the other hand, there is an intense pull to stay here and do what I can to make things better. I can't really make sense of it. I think the optimistic "we can fix it" attitude is baked into the American psyche. In some ways, it's the counterbalance to the rugged individual, bootstraps-pulling attitude that is quintessentially American, but I see them more as being two sides of the same irrationally confident coin. You grow up learning this idealistic fairy tale about the founding fathers who bravely stood up to tyranny, and their long line of successors, like Lincoln and MLK, who also successfully made changes that fixed some of the flaws this country had. The way it's taught and mythologized leads one to believe that America is always improving and that the positive change you wish to see is always around the corner if you're willing to do something about it. That's objectively not true, but it's really hard to shake. So even though I know for a fact that my life would be better if I left, there is an underlying feeling of guilt for "quitting" basically.
So that's where I am at. I'm not sure if anyone else feels the same way or similar. There is definitely a "fuck this, I'm out" point but I don't know what it is yet. Hopefully, if that day comes, it won't be too late.
Yeah, I feel you. I think, for me, in addition to the practical trade-offs (it would be expensive, my particular career pays better in the US than pretty much anywhere else in the world, it would suddenly become very challenging to see my friends and family), there are definitely several moral/ethical challenges that I struggle with.
Like you said, it feels like giving up. A democracy functions through participation; we, at least nominally, make progress through collective action and education. Just up and leaving is very much the opposite of that. It feels like admitting defeat.
Relatedly, part of the reason that admitting defeat is so devastating is that I, like you, am fairly privileged to even be considering this route. I’m also privileged in several other ways, all of which contribute to my being in a position to actively consider this choice. As you say, most people in America do not have this privilege. That means admitting defeat isn’t just saying “damn, I guess it won’t get better”, it’s condemning all of those less fortunate than me to suffer through this defeat, and to do it without my support.
I don’t know what to do with that. Surely I have (and feel) an obligation to my neighbors, my community, and my country to support them and give back. But… I also know that in the not-so-distant future, I plan to have a family, and where I have that family matters! I have more power over the conditions that my children are raised in than I have over the conditions my neighbors live in; does that mean that I should wield that power to put my immediate family in a better position to live life happily and freely, even at the potential expense of removing myself from my community’s (and country’s) system of support, permanently? Do I even have a positive impact on my community now? How would I evaluate such a thing? Does it even make sense to consider this move more than the one I made last summer from a different town in a different state to our home now?
I feel like I basically can not possibly answer any of these questions. I’m also starting to think more about how I might be using them to avoid a more fundamental conversation (and thank you @spctrvl for your post, which helped solidify this for me): I’m really just afraid. What I see happening around me is people with whom I have fundamental philosophical differences coming into more and more power, and I am frightened of what they are doing with that power now, and what it suggests they might do with it in the future. And I feel a strong temptation to act from that place of fear, and I think that I might be trying to use these questions as a way of avoiding confronting that fear.
Unfortunately I still don’t really know what to do, right now, but… thank you anyway to everyone who’s participated in this conversation. Happy to keep talking about this more, too, if people are interested.
Yeah I relate to that pretty hard. While I'm not going international any time soon, I am myself in the process of abandoning Georgia for California or Washington (depending on how things shake out with work, I'll know which by August). There's good work being done in Georgia, and I'm glad I got to cast one of the few thousand votes that helped flip the state in 2020, but at the end of the day I don't want to waste the best years of my life in a state that's intersectionally hostile to like fifty different aspects of my existence. Personally I don't begrudge anybody fleeing, it just sucks that there aren't a lot of places for most people to run to.