Films that made people emigrate
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm always amazed at how many people from my home country (US) I talk to who say, "oh I can't afford to go there". For less than $1500, usually, you can go to the opposite side of the world. And quite often, the living expense is lower than where you came from.
The biggest challenge most people have is that they have a lot of financial and physical anchors - stuff, a house+mortgage, car(s), etc. But I can say from my experience living both types of life that a life of a small amount of stuff and near total freedom to roam is fantastic.
It's a big world, and it's a shame to go through life without really experiencing much of it.
Naturally there is an adjustment period in a new region, but if approached with an open mind an a bit of patience, it can surprise you and become your favorite place to be (and way of life to live).
All that said, it's important to realize that what we may see in movies is typically very carefully framed. Bali is great, but depending on where you are you might experience peace and tranquility or crazy frat party atmosphere. And "The Beach" in Thailand is idyllic - if you are shooting a movie and you can get the place to yourself. Otherwise you need to travel around to find the nice (also beautiful) quiet beaches. Any movie you've seen about Amsterdam may be true, but it too has quite varying character depending on where you go, whom you're with, and what you're seeking.
Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are high on my list to try next.
Visa, immigration status, taxes and such are quite a big factor for people to consider, particularly when they are more established in their lifes.
I guess I'm lucky that my birth country's passport offered visa-free travel to 150+ countries: https://www.henleyglobal.com/passport-index/ranking
* Zweig also mentions how in the late 1930's people whose conversation was normally on a much more intellectual plane —books, opera, art, etc.— were reduced to concrete discussions centred around rumours of which countries it was still relatively easy to get visas for.
In the US at least it goes back a little bit further than WW1, to the Chinese exclusion act in the late 1800’s.
For instance, paupers were often excluded from American cities as early as the 1700's.
As for immigration quotas, early American colonies were more concerned with increasing immigration. America was big and empty. If you had money, you were welcome.
About that. If you didn't have money, you became an indentured servant. Took half your life to pay it off. Not a real citizen until then.
So, sure, you could come to America. But it wasn't all honey and roses. It was different, but not much better.
the US started restrictions (at the time by race) with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Australia and New Zealand had their own versions of the above in place somewhere between the 1880s that and the 1920s.
Latin America also attracted a lot of immigrants so I assume not that many restrictions but I don't know what laws were in place. You'd have to check country by country.
I assume colonial powers didn't restrict their own countrymen from emigrating to their colonies in Africa or Asia but that's just a guess.
I believe the above covers most of the large scale immigration at the time. To be honest I don't know what would happen if say a random Frenchman went to Tokyo/Moscow/Beirut and tried to buy a house, get a job and marry a local but that's an interesting question.
Unfortunately the general wikipedia page isn't complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_law
I think the Americans also deserve some slack for lack of international travel. I really think its out of touch. The rest of the world is far away and its not cheap to travel. $1500 isnt going to pay for many nights in a hotel either. Its a lot to ask for your average person, and very difficult if you have a family. Of course this is less true for your typical hacker news reader who has a good salary, lives in a large city (cheaper flights) and is less likely to have a family (younger and lower birth rates on top of that).
Compare 3 or 4 international flight tickets to enough gas for 8 hours which will get you to fairly different climate and culture and its a no brainer.
It is possible to get a little taste of this, gratis, merely by surfing YouTube in languages (and especially scripts) different from one's own.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Flat numerical values alone don't tell the full story. It's like assuming Irish are all rich because of their colossal GDP--and not considering that it's due to companies shuffling money around.
Typical Americans really are wealthier than typical people in other developed countries. As you said, they own cars (which tend to be bigger and more expensive than typical cars elsewhere). They also tend to have bigger houses with more amenities (air conditioning, dishwasher, clothes washer/dryer, kitchen island, etc). Some may consider these uses of wealth to be gauche or indicative of something unhealthy about American way of life, but that doesn't change the fact that they are uses of wealth.
You can take a taxi and eat at restaurants daily absolutely anywhere in Asia with a fraction of the median US salary. The cost of many things is simply higher in the US. You can get paid $20 an hour, but if a basic sandwich costs $15, you're not saving as much as someone who gets paid $10 and can buy $2 sandwiches. But on paper, the person making $20/hour has tremendously higher disposable income.
In August people will be traveling to me, as I’m getting married. We’re not yet sure where we’ll go honeymooning.
Let's give it a generous read, though. Your life will be more interesting, in all likelihood, if you travel a lot (I can see a few narrow exceptions, but not the point). However.
If you don't leave the US, you are limited to one absolutely huge country that has pretty much every kind of subtropical to alpine climate, landscape, etc., that you can imagine. You don't need a passport to pick up and go whenever you like, and - and this really mattered in the immediate post-COVID world - they can't keep you from coming back home. I took my first ever trip to Hawaii right after they opened back up. It wasn't my first choice of destination - it's a long way from me, it's very expensive once you're there, even compared to the Caribbean - but since it's part of the US, I couldn't get stuck there the way I could in Mexico or the Caribbean. A lot of those resorts, especially in purpose-built tourist areas like Cancun or Cabo, were offering free accomodation if you failed your COVID test and had to wait out a quarantine. I'm sure it wasn't going to be the same room you had booked for your stay, but they were desperate to get the money flowing back in.
Going to Europe or Asia is a whole other thing. Not only is the culture different, but a lot of little details that might not be apparent at first glance. For someone who's used to being self-sufficient and just figuring it out, not so scary - but if you really don't know any of the local language, it's not trivial. I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed. I'd feel like I had wasted a lot of money if I just went there and winged it, whereas in Europe I'm comfortable with (written) Spanish, Portuguese, and French, at least at the level you need to figure things out roughly. So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary, and at least occasionally navigate a sensible but immense transit system with all sorts of unusual quirks.
I could probably figure something out using Google Translate and have a good time - on my own. With my wife in tow, that's just not going to happen. She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy. There's no way she would have done the kind of trips I did when young, where I landed with no cell phone, no hotel reservations, and no particular plan, all alone.
If you're a US citizen you can't be denied entry to the US; if you were going to another continent thne theoretically you could worry about a scenario where they ground all flights (even though they didn't do that at the height of Covid), but even post-Covid it's pretty implausible that they'd fully close the border with Canada or Mexico (and I believe you don't even need a passport?).
> I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed. I'd feel like I had wasted a lot of money if I just went there and winged it...So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary,
This mentality is just utterly bizarre to me.
> She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy. There's no way she would have done the kind of trips I did when young, where I landed with no cell phone, no hotel reservations, and no particular plan, all alone.
You're talking like this is some innate property rather than lack of effort and practice.
It is bizarre, especially the stuff about the addresses. Has the OP never heard of Google Maps? You just point it where you want to go and it tells you how to get there. No one in Japan cares about addresses; the only thing those are really important for is addressing your mail.
But I don't think his mentality is unusual for Americans who contemplate foreign travel. They really do think they need to hire a tour guide for a week to get around in a foreign country.
TBF I've done single day small tour groups with local guides, and when the guide is good, the experience has been amazing.
Doing it first day in Mexico City was actually super useful to get myself orientated and to get a good overview of the mass transit system there, and also to get a list of other things I should do.
Plenty of people from all around the world go on "tour bus" types of tours though, I'd say that before Google Maps and online resources, such tours were likely more popular. You still see huge tour groups at any popular destination, oftentimes grouped together by nationality.
So I'm not averse to doing things that way. And I'm not doing some &^#$Q@ bus tour. But if you want to see the countryside and stay in an onsen* and all that, it's not quite as simple as "someone has good English". I've encountered places in all those where nobody around spoke good English, and we made do in another language and Google Translate. Assuming that, of course, you have good cell service - which was a problem when I tried to drive into a restricted area of old town Krakow. The police officer was polite and helpful, but we didn't share a language and cell service was slooooooow. And Google Maps was absolutely dead wrong about routing and cost me an hour of driving around in a circle (it was rush hour, so traffic, and it though certain roads were connected when they were not - this was only five or six years ago, so not ancient history). My hotel was in that area, so they let me through.
My concerns may be overblown, but they're not arising out of some complete ignorance of how the world works.
And given that I can't go back to when she was 18 and train her how to do these things, it's just one of those things that I have to accept and deal with. Not all fights are worth having, even if you're in the right.
If you find it bizarre, well, so be it. It reflects certain constraints on my life. Maybe some of them are really silly, but if I'm going to Japan, I don't want to spend my entire time in major cities, and this is by far the most direct route to my goal.
That's the basic difference between domestic and foreign travel, isn't it?
I've traveled with people who are (forgive me for the bad wording) equally as easily confused as your wife, if not worse, and into the middle of jungles and villages of far off places. In the 19th century this would've been extremely difficult and dangerous. In the 21st century, you're honestly probably safer wandering around cluelessly in more of the world than you are in the US.
And I never felt like I was missing out by not being able to read a random thing in a language I don't know. Tourist locations, especially places like museums and historical sites, will almost always have full English translations of whatever the local language is.
There's no "winging" it. You can plan for a country even when you don't know the language. Just save locations on google maps and go.
In one village the English speaker was an American oil drilling engineer who changed course to become a philosophy professor, and then changed course again to live out his retirement in this tiny Greek mountain town. I really regret not staying longer there.
In the next town, the English speaker was a guy who had left 30 years ago to work in the Canadian fishing industry, and only returned a week previously. He translated for a lot of the family elders, who were reaaally old and remembered doing the yearly pilgrimage on foot through the mountain passes.
(Then I came to a town and chatted with a random person... When I described where I had been and where I was going, she crossed herself and begged me to turn back! Felt like a scene from a Dracula knock off...)
And finally, I came to a very remote village, where I was housed by an Canadian woman who had lived in the village for like sixty years and forgotten all of her English! (Which was communicated through a combination of artifacts, drawing, and pantomime.)
Which is to say, you've gotta get real far off the beaten path to find places where no one speaks English. And even then, people are helpful and fascinating.
(For example, one train transfer that I thought seemed dicey actually had enough time built in to figure out an ongoing ticket with the ticket both, get to the platform, and then wait around for twenty minutes explaining the local train's car numbering system to other tourists who hadn't figured it out yet.)
There's a lot of understanding and tolerance of difference, in Japan in particular. You are a guest. Putting in some effort to learn how to do things is respectful, and there's a lot of tolerance for getting things not quite right of you're giving it an honest shot.
I've lived a lot of places: US, Hungary, Kenya, and visited a lot more. if you approach the world with an open heart and good intentions, people will tend meet you there.
Japan caters very well to American tourists. Plenty of menus are in English, signs to anyplace you need to go will have romanized letters, and on top of that your phone will happily translate a decent % of written text.
Heck lots of countries have English signs all over the place. Since a large % of people with money know English, it has become tourist language of sorts.
> She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy.
Yeah my wife is the same way, we did just fine in Japan. We stuck together, and as a reminder, phones have maps on them, maps that let you live stream your location to other people. Maps that give turn by turn directions so you can find someone if you get separated.
> So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary, and at least occasionally navigate a sensible but immense transit system with all sorts of unusual quirks.
No, you just go to Japan and eat really damn good food. This is particularly easy in Japan since restaurants there have 3d sculpted models of the dishes they serve out front. Plenty of restaurants have digital ordering kiosks (and they've had them long before the US did), and you just tap on the picture of the dish that looks yummy. It is pretty damn easy. For the ones that don't have kiosks, you can just point at the miniature of whatever dish you want.
Japan gets over a million and a half visitors from the US every year. Capitalism being what it is, plenty of services have sprung up to ensure tourists who can afford a $2k flight have ways to spend the rest of their disposable income.
When I was a kid in Finland in the 80s and 90s, families often took vacations in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands. It was affordable enough even to many lower middle class families. Those were not particularly close destinations. The distances were comparable to Americans flying to the Caribbean.
Cultural habits are probably the real reason. Finns travel internationally because Finns travel internationally. Americans do it less often because Americans do it less often.
Americans travel a bunch, and I'm not convinced they travel shorter distances than Europeans. It's just because the country's so big, it's not international.
I've traveled a lot since then. A lot of the countries I've visited were other places I'd considered moving, but I immediately knew they weren't for me. They reassured me that I really did find the perfect place to call my home. I've also found some places that I had zero expectations for that were almost as comfortable as where I live now. But generally, no matter where I go, I feel better about the home I've made for myself. Traveling is (mostly) fun, but I'm always glad to come home.
You're right: $1500 will only get you a few nights at an American hotel chain like Hilton here in Japan ($400/night at Hilton Tokyo). If you use local hotels, you could spend a month here for that much money, but Americans can't stay at non-American hotels, just like they can't go anywhere on public transit and need to rent a huge SUV to drive everywhere.
It's extremely expensive for Americans to travel internationally, because they simply can't live and travel like the locals, and need to do everything like they're back in America.
That said, I am 45, very healthy, have had success in three different professions and am looking at an amazingly free run into my 50s. It would be easier now for me to travel than when I was young, not to mention that I am much better positioned to learn from that experience than I might have when I was in my 20s.
So on one hand, when you have kids it indeed doesn't look fun (or even possible for most folks) to travel or emegrate. But on the other hand, you can have kids without spending the rest of your life raising them.
On one hand, when I immigrated, it took ~2 years to learn the language and ~5 years to feel at home in the culture.
On the other hand, by "voting with my feet" I gained the benefit of not having to die waiting for the glacial pace of political progress in the Old Country.
On the gripping hand, now that I'm married with a house and pets I'm very glad I had the opportunity to "see the world" (including a few ~24 hour travel legs) when I was younger and far less anchored.
Edit: wow, voting with one's feet has an interesting etymology; see senatores pedarii in https://acoup.blog/2023/09/22/collections-how-to-roman-repub...
(a misquotation of Rudyard Kipling that I've carried in my head for 30 years)
Moving to the (rich part of) EU from the non-Western world is certainly not easy.
I don’t know if I should read these pieces as “I can transfer freely with full job security worldwide” or “I sold everything and fought hard”.
Otherwise all I’m reading is “you should travel. It’s fun.”
Which is fine. Just recognize these articles for what they are - part of the entertaining filler that makes up most of the paper - and not some hard-hitting analytical piece on emerging global migration patterns!
To answer your question about visas - it is country-dependent. Some countries offer Digital Nomad visas or other long-term non-permanent visas. I agree with you that it's another big omission of the article.
Which all adds up to make this a fluff piece.
given that you're on hackernews, I guess I should let you know that being a software engineer is the ultimate hack for being able to travel wherever you want.
I started freelancing while travelling and then joined the ground floor of a startup. I took a huge paycut vs working for a FANG but I get to change countries every 1-2 months and no one cares as long as I get my work done. 20+ countries in after doing this for 7 years straight.
And my general impression is that outside the US visa stuff is relatively straightforward if you're going into a skilled job.
Of course I had to give it a watch after a review like that. Good show.
Reality is never quite like the movies but there's definitely something there. You do get some sense of fulfillment and you do usually get to experience what you wanted... The problem is usually not that the culture doesn't have what you thought it had (it often does), the problem is that there are often unseen downsides that simply did not occur to you and you could not imagine being a problem before you made the move since they are not a problem in your own culture. You don't notice what your culture gets right.
[0] not sole or even primary, just outsize.