Judging by how many users on the internet telling Americans to "just move to another country lolz", people must think immigration laws are very lax or something... (it's not)
Dude, I would flee the US in a heartbeat to somewhere that isn't a fascist state if I feasibly could, as I kinda don't feel safe here as a citizen, let alone what anyone visiting the country may feel like.
So that “if I feasibly could” part is exactly what the poster is talking about.
Us citizen here recently moved to Sweden. I have a lot of things going for me: I was able to save up money working in tech, I'm using that to pay for living and tuition on a study permit, recently divorced and mostly estranged so I don't have a lot of ties holding me back, I have a sought after skillset and enough savings to basically be guaranteed I was accepted.
I'm still struggling with everything. There was and is so much paperwork, so many loose ends, even after getting here it's just been months of hardship trying to get stuff lined up. Trying to get my savings out of USD without interrupting being able to pay for things and not risk being flagged for money laundering is an ongoing battle. Housing here is wonky and I'm risking homelessness next year if I can't get it figured out in time. I have no strong community ties here yet so I'm toast if I stumble too badly. The US has their grubby hands all up in my business still so I'm answering to two countries at any given time instead of just one.
There are certainly avenues people can take to get out of the US that are easier than what I've done but anyone who says it is easy is full of shit or incredibly privileged.
I wish you all the best. I moved countries twice and had to learn 2 different languages. It's a struggle
US citizen here, have been actively preparing for a permanent move to Japan with my Japanese citizen spouse, dual citizenship toddler, and our dog for the past 6 months. We are fortunate enough to have the money and legal pathway to do it, and it has still been one of the most stressful experiences (if not the most) of my life.
We’ve had to:
Sell our house, Sell our two cars, Get rid of all our belongings (gave most of them away because it’s just too time consuming to try and sell everything), Apply for a certificate of eligibility for my visa Apply for my visa, Get all the vaccinations and paperwork for our dog and wait 6 months after getting them done, Make arrangements for the dog’s overseas travel, Buy our airline tickets, Find an apartment in Japan without being able to see it in person, Find work in Japan, Find a preschool for our kid in Japan, Have to enter Japan within 3 months of my visa being issued (but NOT sooner than 180 days after the dog gets his 2nd rabies shot and bloodwork results), Etc.
And if we make a mistake on any one of those steps or get delayed and miss our 3-month window, we have to do half of the steps again.
All while continuing to work full time and with a move from our house to the apartment in the middle.
We are close to the finish line, but it has pushed us all to the absolute edges of our mental and physical limits. And again, we are extremely fortunate to have enough savings and equity in our home to even be able to try this…
For the average US citizen, I’d say it’s nearly impossible.
I read that you can't hold multiple citizenships as a citizen of Japan. So I'd imagine your kid will be forced to give one up when they become an adult?
This is actually a very fun legal loophole for Japanese citizens. The Japanese law as written states you cannot gain citizenship to a country and remain a Japanese citizen, but because of US law, you aren’t voluntarily a citizen when you are born, you just are a citizen. So as long as you don’t renounce your Japanese citizenship you can remain a citizen of both.
Could have been worse, you could be a white person trying to find a place to live in Japan in person. There are lots of places that would not be open to you.
Yeah, I’ve certainly experienced my fair share of racism in Japan. Mostly micro-aggression / implicit bias type of stuff, but a few intentional instances as well.
Not looking forward to that.
Something you can look forward to: you get to watch anime without subtitles after you learn Japanese :P
I’ve been studying / speaking / reading / writing Japanese for 25 years. Lived there for 6 years, and used Japanese exclusively at work for 3 years after coming back to the states. So no big issues language-wise.
I was never a huge anime person until my wife and I started watching some during covid. We’re definitely anime people now.
My thing was always Japanese arcade games.
Can't really immigrate as a disabled person. I'm basically considered unwanted trash by everyone.
Not entirely true. I've done the research. It's difficult, yes, but some places in the world allow it. E.g. Scandinavian countries.
Yup. Being disabled you're basically fucked.
In had no idea. Sorry about your situation.
On top of that, people have families, jobs, and other commitments that hinder their plans. Moving to another town is already hard enough as it is, but relocating to another country is even harder.
While it’s certainly possible and perhaps even advisable, it’s not a realistic option for most people. If your life is in danger, remaining isn’t really an option, so any associated difficulties with moving and starting anew are the lesser evil. However, for everyone else, the situation gets complicated.
My small children are in Arkansas and I'm in Florida. I cannot leave. My wife and I are thinking of moving her home to the Philippines when we retire, but my kids will only be young adults.
Immigration is only easy if you're wealthy.
In addition to immigration laws, there are lots of other reasons that make it difficult to move. Aside from obvious financial considerations, it is difficult to just walk away from one's social circle. People often underestimate the importance of social support (I'm talking about friends and family here). Cultural differences compound this social isolation further.
Precisely this. My partner and I uprooted our lives to move to a new country. I left a loving community, a strong career, and so much more. I absolutely miss my home but didn't feel safe continuing to live in the states. I pulled the trigger first chance I could and I'm glad I did because there haven't been any since then.
We cry very often because there is so much just trauma and grief that we haven't been able to process. No one tells you just how hard it's gonna be. To give an example, I frequently hallucinate seeing or hearing my friends around my new city. Every time I do I have to hold back tears. I absolutely choke up whenever I video call them. Getting a visa is just the start of the process.
(Don't get me wrong, I also LOVE my new home, this country has been nothing but welcoming and we have had a super easy time assimilating and making friends)
I never had friends in China, I never missed anyone "back home" (well... its not like I got to know any of the relative very well, so I didn't miss them being 8 at the time) but I constantly think about the hypothetical alt-universe where I never left China... like for better or worse... its hard to stop thinking about it.
I feel like I belong in neither places.
Like existential crisis stuff.
On the surface, in 2010, the US was also seemingly welcoming, but you have subtle casual racism stuff, especially when you move to less-immigrant cities like Philly. Kids here wete just horrible. The Elementary school I went to had not much Asians so racism was common, worse in middle school.
Like you had no idea how much shit I had to go through, and identity crisis. Who the fuck am I. I don't know if I can do this again, especially the learning a language thing, now I don't have the advantage of youth again. And I'm the adult now having to plan everything, instead of everything already being done for me.
Like... it'd be so sad if I pick a place, miraculously get an immigration visa, then that place goes to shit AGAIN, then I'd have to do this v3.0 lmao
Depression is killing me lol
I think for me, its not just "move to EU" that easily. Like... the population of Asians in EU is much lower afaik, I would feel even less "belonging" there tbh.
Which country?
Emigrating and immigrating as they are, poor people mostly cannot.
Not everyone will be able to move, it's true, but a lot of countries have provisions for reclaiming citizenship if you can show that an ancestor (usually only in the last couple of generations, but not always) was a citizen.
For instance, Ireland: if one of your parents was an Irish citizen, born on the island of Ireland, you can claim citizenship and a passport with minimal paperwork. If your parents weren't born there, but a grandparent was, there's more paperwork involved, but you can still get citizenship and a passport.
Once you have a passport for an EU country, you have a lot more freedom to travel, and settle, anywhere in the EU.
Many other countries have similar systems, so, if you do want to leave, it can be worth studying your family tree to see if there are any recent immigrants.
if you do want to leave, it can be worth studying your family tree to see if there are any recent immigrants.
Family tree. 👀
I was born in China, I don't wanna go back.
I could theoretically try to recover citizenship, but nah, there is a reason why we left in the first place.
I did notice your username, so I suspected this might not apply to you, but maybe it'll be helpful to someone.
All I can really offer you is 'good luck, hang in there and this too shall pass', which is probably not a lot of comfort.
I tried that route, but it turns out my folks left the Poland before it was modern Poland, so never held Polish citizenship. If only they'd sucked it up and stayed through World War I. /s
My great grandparents are from Ireland. My understanding is if I can fully document our relationship I could be eligible. I look into it every few years but cannot find anything linking them to Ireland.
Even reached out to my cousin in Ireland that had done her family tree years ago. No help.
Another set of great grandparents are from Italy. Italian law currently blocks my citizen claim because their is a female in the lineage.
The best documents would be birth certificates for each generation, but there was a massive fire at the Dublin records office in 1922, which destroyed a lot of genological records from before then. If you have any information about where in Ireland your great grandparents were from, you may be able to find local records however. Things like parish registers and birth records for sone denominations were stored outside Dublin, so you may be able to find them, although it'll probably mean going there, or hireing to go there, as most of those records haven't been digitised.
My family is hillbilly going back a gen or three, Appalachia to the Ozarks. Can't claim any foreign blood. :(
It's not even just the laws, it's very expensive to move.
If it's not sarcasm in response to americans telling other people to just move to another country/overthrow government, it can be a common misconception. Yet I struggle to see where it comes from: as far as I can tell, "just moving to another country" is not something most people who work for a wage can easily do
This is correct. Ithought I could almost afford it, but I would need to save up an amount of money that is not really possible to save up in my situation and besides that I don't know if I could psychologically manage actually getting everything lined up and working properly in a whole other country. I've looked into it in depth, and it is incredibly taxing and difficult.
I don't know if it's something I could ever really manage, even in some of the countries that are "easier" to immigrate to.
Yeah, I can relate. Thought of migration too, but first, need to save up a... considerable lot of money. Next, that's a whole lot of things to do, including bureaucracy, and then I am at square less than one. There has to be some kind of paradise or once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on the other side for me to go through all that
I’ve also read “move to another state” a lot. Which is also much easier said than done, even though there are some very legitimate reasons. Moving from a low cola to a high one is tough.
Also, you need employment and it's really hard. Then there is no guarantee that you'll be stable there either, since society is collapsing.
I've always wondered how easy it would be to just move to Mexico or Canada, since either is possible to drive to. Like, legally or not.
They can deport you. Unless you try to claim asylum, but then you need to "prove" that the US Government is actually persecuting you, do you even have such "proof"?
Perhaps being targetted by ICE could qualify. Being brown could help in this scenario.
Mexico is pretty easy. I think you can get a 5 year residency permit easily with no income or requirement to stay in country. Canada is harder and probably requires you to have a job lined up with an employer willing to sponsor. Or, you can go to school.
Stay and vote!! Talk to your neighbors and vote!!
Yup, it's no different than people retiring from the positions that could stop the current administration. You're just making it easier for them.
Totally feeling this as i consider retiring early from public education because it sucks so bad right now!
Cant vote your way out of a fundamentally oppressive system.
Not really going to matter much when the vote is rigged anyways like it probably will be during the upcoming elections.
For example, in my state, Independent voters are banned from the primaries, you have to be registered GOP or Democrat to vote in the primaries in Oklahoma now.
I'd say that might come under constitutional scrutiny, but the Constitution and Bill of Rights are dead letters now.
-sigh- If I can't feasibly leave this fascist-ass country, can I at least move to one of the Blue states which aren't complete shitholes yet?
I could have gained citizenship in Spain or Portugal based on my family name alone (and like €600 or so) when they had the citizenship path for Sephardic Jewish heritage. I found out too late though and they had closed the door before I even knew about my distant relatives in the first place.
Wife is Irish enough to claim her passport so we're working that path currently. Those things are just your right to establish a life there, though, and don't include figuring out housing, source of income and everything else.
It certainly feels like we're going to miss our chance, but it's definitely worth it to keep working toward IMO.
I actually looked into migrating a bit under Bush and they were more lax then. It was at least a year waiting list, you often had to have a marketable skill of some sort in demand in the country or enough money to basically never work again there. You had to have a clean record, pay several thousand for paperwork and lawyers, wait for approval, some wanted you to try and find employment before hand. It's probably much stricter no as I doubt I could immigrate to Canada from the USA. They're looking primarily for healthcare workers now and a lot of places because of their aging populations and lower birth rates. It's nuts.
Not only the laws and the costs, there's also the fact that I just don't want to change the way I live. There's nowhere on Earth that has the things I have here, and I own land (admittedly only .25 acres, but still).
If you want to start a business in the Netherlands as an American, you can get a visa under the DAFT program. You do need to bring the substantial investment of at least 4500 euro into the business.
There was a program across many European countries where the wealthy could basically legally buy visas: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/realestate/europe-homes-sale-americans-lisbon-barcelona.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8k8.8kzm.JXddN45A1l0k Was being phased out country by country due to jacking up housing prices, though, but on the other hand some countries have kept it while removing housing as a route: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/business/golden-visa-spain-europe-housing-crisis.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mE0.RznS.5NJdOYdNsasA
It’s not really jacking up housing prices in Portugal. Only 33k ever used the golden visa route there and that includes the non-real estate investment options. If you look at total real estate sales, golden visa transactions accounted for like 1%. That said, the perception caused them to eliminate the real estate investment route. The real issue in Portugal is they let 1 million people in on other visa types for a country that only has a population of 10 million.
The anger on the golden visa is odd. People are basically risking money in a country, not even living there, or consuming its resources, and may never. Some golden visas just involve giving the government a huge sum of money with no chance of recuperating it. In exchange, they get citizenship after a decade without even using a single government service.
Americans have probably the easiest migration path in the world. Strong passport, very high wages and currency value, strong migration support and programs, remote friendly economy etc etc.
No, we can't just move some place. Most countries require a substantial income or huge investment. Incomes require jobs, and countries require employers to make an attempt to hire citizens first. Most of us speak one language too, so even if we go to the shittiest countries, we'll be vulnerable to scams.
Yeah. Apparently to these people, America is the only country that people can think of that has strict immigration laws. Everyone else is apparently open borders without question.
And even then some countries like mine Uruguay are very easy to emigrate to.
You need income. If you have a job in your country, you can't take it with you unless it can be done remotely. I have looked into moving there. I still have not figured out if command terminals are in Portuguese if a person works as an IT admin somewhere.
How do you like Uruguay? Would you recommend it?
I don't think I can move out of Estonia any time soon, but sometimes I would like to escape to a warmer, but not super hot place... and Montevideo looks beautiful
Yeah, some countries do have very strict standards for entry as much as the US; they'll choose only those they deem worthy by their standards -- entry is only possible with either level of wealth, skill sets, pedigree, language, or a combination of those.
However, there are some people in my country who envy and would even fight to get a chance to be American, despite the ongoing horrors in there, because they still equate citizenship in a developed country with wealth and supposed freedom from corruption.
I have sort of the opposite problem. My wife and I moved to Japan in our 20s and it was pretty damn easy because I'm a citizen and I had family help me find an apartment for us. We were 100% set in terms of basic necessities in like a week and could start job hunting immediately. Now that I'm in my 40s, we're trying to go back to Canada so we can take care of our parents more and let the kids experience Canadian schools, but it's so god damn expensive to do anything.
Is it really that common? I've seen people say that a few times but I actually expected more. Like, one or several comments saying it in every comment thread about anyone showing disagreement with everything going on. But it's been a rare show of intelligence and basic comprehension among all the places it easily could have been said.
I don't want americans to leave the united state of fascism. I want them to stop voting in imbecilic tyrannical genocidal despots that are convicted rapists who like to fuck children so much that they are compromised by the russians.
Now let me be clear, the orange buffoon that's in 'control' now is all of the above, but any one thing of the above list is bad.
If a fair election ever happens again -because, let's face it, it's not guaranteed- and you feel that the person you are about to vote for is a russian stooge, or a kiddie fiddling rapist, or an imbecile etc etc then STOP ...and then vote in the person who will most likely not rape children, or try to overthrow your government for their own personal gain 👍.
Everyone I personally know in the Untied States who could vote, I'm pretty sure voted for Kamala Harris
You're preaching to the choir here bub
Problem is it's near impossible to convince people in non-swing states to vote if they normally don't. A lot of people view it as "my vote doesn't matter cause the other side always wins this state" so you'd have to constantly try to battle that mindset. Doing that for 500,000+ people (that's just for my state if you wanted to flip it blue or get it close to purple) is asking a lot.
I'm more realistic. I tell people to leave the Untied States if they can. I realize not everyone can but I know people who have other options and choose to stay there. People with ties to other countries
They are much laxer for USAians than they are for poorer third-world countries, I'll tell you that much! Don't kid yourself, the USAian passport still has a lot of strength. It opens doors to many places.
If you want to move, there are actually many options, it doesn't have to be Europe. Vietnam for example needs English teachers and they aren't exactly picky on how well you speak English. If you can speak another language, you already have one leg up compared to your mono-lingual compatriots e.g Spanish cat get you to many places.
Simply going "oh, it's hopeless, I can't move anyway" is the wrong attitude. If you have studied, you already belong to 30% of the population that has. Try applying abroad. If you haven't studied yet, get a loan, study (pick a study that has a future), leave the US and never return. There's no need to pay off the load if you leave because having debt isn't illegal and they aren't going to drag you back from another country to pay your debt.
What I'm saying is, there's options. If you're USAian, living in the USA, you live in one of the most prosperous country in the world and have quite a few advantages over say a farmer in Mongolia or an Iranian. If an Iranian can get out of Iran and become a citizen of a European country, so can you.
It's more like "following the atrocities caused by Western imperialism, people have been moving around trying to find safety and if they did it, why can't you, citizen of the murderous empire?".
Immigration is very possible to a lot of countries via employer sponsored routes, generally for highly developed countries the requirement is "you have to be earning above average for your industry," so essentially if you're in the top 50% by skill/experience you should be allowed in. Others require certain levels of education, etc. but for US citizens those levels should generally be achievable.
Relatively, moving to the US has been so much harder than moving out for a long time now, which is why people are saying "just move out."
This reply has some pretty strong "Git gud, Scrub" Energy. It is not a helpful Thing to suggest, and it's not exactly "generally ... achievable" when the entire society is built around forcing people into Mountains of debt.
Yeah, I agree with that, but if you're really desperate to move and worked in a way where it's you're only goal, it should be possible for around half of people. That may mean living in a shared room in the cheapest part of the bad area of town, getting around on a shitty bike, eating rice and beans while you save up level of frugality, but at that point it's probably worth evaluating if it's worth living like that to be able to leave the country down the line, and in most cases, it's probably not.
Essentially, not "git good," just "it is possible, just probably not worth it."
Also the post was about immigration controls anyway, not having the means to actually move.
Relatively, moving to the US has been so much harder than moving out for a long time now
Wut? Barring like the past 10 months of the current administration (because you said "for a long time"), the US has consistently been at the top of the charts for gross immigration for decades.
Where do you even get the idea that the average American (poor, monolingual, undereducated/uncredited) has an easier time moving to another (comparable) country than one does to it?
Yes, I was referring to someone in the top 50% of earners, still half of all people in the US.
To get to most countries if you're on that demographic, you just need to have a job.
To get to the US historically, you needed to either get a H1B visa, which last I heard had a 9% chance per year, enter the green card lottery, which has a 0.3% chance per year, or transfer within your company after getting promoted to a managerial role via an L1A visa, which is a slow process and very dependant on who you work for, and on your origin country for acceptance rates.
For people in the bottom 50%, I agree it's historically been easier to go the US with the green card lottery, fairly accessible visas if you have immediate family living in the US, and even for illegal immigration with birthright citizenship, as then you can get a green card through your children.
I was basing my comment on the fact most people on Lemmy are going to be nerds working in IT/Sciences/Engineering, but even then, if you take a mean "ease for a random sample to move" then it's still harder to move to the US than out of it.