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I’m preparing to renounce my American citizenship (lived most of my life elsewhere, no remaining ties to the USA), and I am amused by the frequent exhortation on internet fora against renunciation "If you have a US passport, you can rely on the US government to get you out of trouble". People really seem to think that Seal Team Six is on standby to save any ordinary American facing violence or natural disaster abroad. Me, I remember the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami when many European countries swiftly evacuated their citizens or citizens of fellow EU states, while US citizens were mainly left to fend for themselves.
In practical terms, it’s a good passport. You will be able to travel to many countries visa free. Not the best passport (Japan’s is, but much harder to get) but still pretty good.
You also have work authorization in a highly developed economy. Probably the highest pay for Software Engineers.
The US is also a good place to start a company. Large market, mostly homogeneous, pretty developed.
The US isn’t great when it comes to economic equality but also not the worst. However its anti poverty programs aren’t great and companies can be predatory with little by way of consumer protection.
Buying a house is still achievable in the US but getting harder.
Schools are pretty good if you live in a nice neighborhood. If you’re poor, good luck.
You will be surveilled. Pretty much every country with the means to do so will surveil its citizens, so that’s not a differentiator for me. The question is how much, and how that information can be used in the future.
I like investing basically all of my money and traveling whenever I want to. I'm not married yet so this has been working out pretty well - especially since I left NYC.
I don't know about NYC, but the Bay Area doesn't fulfill those anymore. The number of people on the street. Trash. Crime. It's getting wild out there. I live in a very safe community and a 70 year old woman was beat up for a few dollars last week a few blocks from my house (and 1 block from the police department!).
Sad that even in my prior neighborhood (los altos) there are carjackings and armed home invasions now... Impossible to imagine in 2015 while I was there :(
I, like you, wish there was such a place where everything just worked. Everyone got along. I think we all long for such a place.
Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands all seem to be getting along just fine.
Switzerland's GDP per capita is around 25% higher than the United States. I would further guess that Switzerland probably has much less inequality than the United States. The Swiss are uniformly rich compared to the extremes of America.
Do most people in those countries look the same?
Italy has a range of physical features that would surprise a lot of Americans and most Americans would not bucket every fully-native-for-generations Italian as white based on appearance. (In addition to the other side, lots of people that most Americans would think look too northern European to be Italian.)
I think you are projecting American racism onto other places. (Not that these other places don't have their own racism.)
Yep! It’s alright. We definitely aren’t the greatest country in the world, but it’s nice enough to be enjoyable, and boring enough to not put random personal or societal disasters in your way with any sort of regularity.
Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personnel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there).
What's interesting is we opened a satellite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada.
The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
Montréal on the other hand, people will fight for. You can live here for (relative to Toronto) cheap, get the whole urban dream, and live around some very nice people that are equally proud of their city.
Otherwise a lot has been going downhill and there is too much patriotic pride to admit or change it. But it's multiple issues, hyper-capitalism, lobbyists, no form of conflict of interest rules for politicians or anyone working for them, multiple news channels supporting "2 views", but all on the same page of ignoring the class warfare.
I've talked to lots of people from other countries as I meet a lot of people and talk to many and most see us as going downhill or having poor worker rights and no social safety net (healthcare).
Someone from China told me their parents think Americans work too much. Another person from Eastern Europe things we are in the toilet, etc. Other people from South America saying how they would pick Canada over the US any day. I just laugh when I hear it, because I feel we are too blind to see it.
School shooting solutions are all about guns instead of the real issue, mental health.
Politicians that want people limited on what they can earn with SS (keeping elderly people poor), when they get very good retirement benefits. Politicians dodging taxes or making sure the IRS is ill staffed, when its proven more IRS helps get the bungled dollars from Big Companies and Pockets that are cheating the system.