Americans Are Heading for the Exits | Hacker News Reader

Americans Are Heading for the Exits

newrepublic.com

68 pointsmiles63 comments

Where are they headed to that’s doing substantially better government-wise than USA?

You are right that all of the first world is under attack by destabilizing forces. But in many European countries these foreign backed extremists are thankfully still the majority, not the elected government.

Did you mean "minority" rather than "majority"?

They probably don’t throw nazi salutes out at their inaugurations either.

If Europe can escape becoming Socialist/Nazi, they'll soon be a Muslim Caliphate if demographic trends continue.

> Socialist/Nazi

What?

See the other half of their comment re: Muslims, considering that among not-formerly-Ottoman European countries the one with the highest % Muslim population is France at 7.5%, the person you replied to is clearly being hyperbolic and not making a serious point.

It helps that many European countries don't have a presidential democracy but rather a parlementairy democracy - making the concentration of power and execution of bad ideas within a single party and person much more difficult.

Europe seems to be executing on its terrible ideas just fine

The article doesn’t say.

Implies people are applying for dual citizenship of Ireland and Mexico, but without any concrete data.

That’ll depend on the person—if you’re trans and having a hard time passing, you may well feel safer in Cuba.

That said, you’re implying a point that’s valid: much of the world is in an oppressive state right now. South America’s always a mix, but most of its states are seemingly less stable now than a few years back; Mexico’s narcoviolence is spiking; Central Europe is trending right-authoritarian, India’s under Modi, and Africa and Central Asia aren’t typically on USian’s radar.

That basically leaves Canada, the nordics, and Western Europe.

Brazil is arguably on a trend to become more stable, not less. Argentina is a bit of a tossup, but if Milei pulls off what he's trying to do, it could come out a lot stronger. Or it could all collapse, but I wouldn't say it's right now less stable than it was four years ago. Mexico might have cartel issues but as a whole the country is on a huge economic upswing.

Somewhere like Singapore is a stable option as well. Australia and New Zealand.

China might be authoritarian, and the language is hard, but if someone is willing to conform and defer to the Party they can do well there. And if a person's thesis is "I am leaving the US because it is losing its status as a world power", China is the logical country which will be stepping into that vacuum.

In the past, the languages that "everyone spoke" to do business were first Latin, then French, now English. In the future it will be Spanish and Chinese.

Literally everybody I know in Brazil - and I know dozens of people there - would disagree with the statement that Brazil is getting more stable.

Could you elaborate? The people you know in Brazil think that the prosecution of Bolsonaro represents less democratic stability than the leadership of Bolsonaro?

I don't know details because I don't ask. I just hear them complaining about how the current administration is contributing to the country's ongoing decline. Not once I heard "things are getting better now".

The current president is governing for the 3rd time already. I understand this is allowed by Brazil's constitution and he was technically elected democratically but doesn't inspire a lot of confidence regarding Brazil's democracy. I believe he also had a woman president (Dilma?) as his proxy for 8 years. Sounds too similar to the kind of thing you see in Russia.

This is just my take when looking at it from the outside.

> The current president is governing for the 3rd time already. I understand this is allowed by Brazil's constitution and he was technically elected democratically but doesn't inspire a lot of confidence regarding Brazil's democracy.

I don't understand why this doesn't inspire confidence for you. Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany for four terms, do you feel similarly about Germany's democracy?

I'm not saying Brazil's government is perfect or corruption free by any means, but when I ask for examples of what's wrong with it, "the president has served a number of terms less than or equal to the maximum permitted by law" doesn't seem like a good primary criticism...

Granted, Lula's approval rating is not great.

Lack of term limits is a problem for any democracy. This isn't as much of an issue for parliamentary systems where the head of government is under continuous vigilance and can be quickly removed; that's not what Brazil has as far as I know.

The next lingua franca won't be Mandarin. Most other asians refuse to learn it for "reasons," and it's hideously hard for others not exposed to tonal languages to learn.

Both those factors may change if China becomes sufficiently economically dominant on a global scale. Certainly they remain on an economic upwards trajectory, for now.

They may be staring down the barrel of a demographic crisis and a real estate collapse. Will those happen, at sufficient magnitude and proper timing to prevent their global economic dominance? Hard to say. We'll have to wait and see.

Mandarin is already on its way to becoming the lingua franca of electronics manufacturing. Many devices don’t have datasheets in any other language. I expect that to happen in other fields that China is taking over like biotech, especially with the US committing science-funding suicide. People learn a lingua franca out of necessity, not want.

> And if a person's thesis is "I am leaving the US because it is losing its status as a world power"

I think for more people it is “I am leaving the US because it is becoming a much worse place and the government is self-destructing, and it is sabotaging all of its allegiances.”

> That basically leaves Canada, the nordics, and Western Europe.

AU/NZ? JP?

Fair call on AU/NZ. JP is a bigger ask in terms of cultural integration.

A friend and his husband have retired to Lisbon and are having a great time. The gay community there seems to be thriving.

Anywhere in the EU.

Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Uruguay

(we hold permanent residency in Mexico, as well as a residency visa in Spain)

> Where are they headed to that’s doing substantially better government-wise than USA?

Possible metrics:

* Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

YMMV.

* Edit2: Some lists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life

That assumes you only care about "freedom" in a fairly nebulous sense, as defined by a series of indices. I suspect a lot of people also care about quality of life, how much money they can make, cost of living, speaking the language, liking the weather and the food, and their ability to actually emigrate without spending a decade of their lives struggling to attain citizenship.

Probably a lot of overlap with top countries and:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_quality_of_life_indices

* https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/

This is a phenomenon that can only apply to people with money and usually connections to other countries. Most people are fucking stuck here. However, you will see brain drain.

The Guardian reported that Canadian police apprehended more than a dozen people from Venezuela, the Middle East, and Africa trying to cross the border in dangerously cold temperatures without proper clothing, as the Trump administration revoked humanitarian parole for Venezuelans, Haitians, and others

You don't have to be rich to leave.

With any semblance of security, you do.

Point taken, but these are people, particularly Venezuela and the Middle East, living in countries the U.S. has intentionally attempted to economically destroy or in some cases bomb the living shit out of.

This is not entirely accurate (although sufficient wealth, income or ancestry to obtain residency is easier). If you have skills, you can also expat, as many countries have job boards to help folks who intend to immigrant for work. A list of links to these job boards can be found in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943292.

It's a bit humorous to see so many Americans simply say with hubris "yeah I'm moving to Europe / Asia / NZ / Australia" as if those countries don't have their own immigration requirements and laws.

I wonder if we will see actual refugees from the US in Europe this term. People who aren't safe in the US anymore, like ones from the LHIBTQ community, government employees, Democrats. Things have already been crazier than most would have expected.

With an estimated budget deficit of $1.6T, the USA can hardly be considered an example of good governance. People should leave to places that can afford thrm

And alas everything happening right now is pretext, building cover for massive tax cuts for billionaires. None of these "savings" are going to go to paying down debt or balancing the budget.

Debt interest just passed defense spending. The debt we have is absolutely wildly high. But certainly the GOP has zero interest in changing that, in improving things. https://www.cfr.org/blog/first-time-us-spending-more-debt-in...

The bond market will eventually force their hand to live within their means.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-30/bond-v... | https://archive.today/SrEy4

I remember a lot of talk of Americans leaving for Trump's first term. Not many did.

We got Ellen DeGeneres over to the Cotswolds this time so that's one at least.

Same thing with Brexit, although a lot wish they really did leave now

A lot of the Europeans left although that's a bit of a different thing really - them going home rather than Brits leaving. I know a few Brits who have left although it's not especially down to Brexit, more it just being a bit dreary here these days. Though Brexit has contributed to the dreariness.

From the Bay Area I know 3 families that have left to the EU since Trump’s first term. I know another 2 that are planning to join our friends in the EU before the end of the year and are just waiting for consulate appointments that are being booked the instant they are being made available.

The consulate appointments drying up immediately lead me to believe that people are in-fact trying to leave…

It's not super easy to emigrate and the systems countries have set up won't be capable of handling x times what they currently process. So it's fair to say many more people could be trying to leave but people leaving doesn't actually rise much.

My family is waiting for our EU (German) citizenship by descent applications to be processed. We started the process about a year ago specifically because of the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

I’m an experienced software engineer who already works remotely for a company with employees in Europe. Of course that puts us in a rare and fortunate category among those who want to leave.

Germany is in major trouble, wait for the election tomorrow. The economy is extremely depressed. As someone who spends 30-40% of my time there it's really not good. The immigration is very concerning to many if not most Germans. Energy costs are 4-6x what they are here. Manufacturing is significantly down since COVID (chinese EVs anyone) and with high energy prices they are in deep trouble.

Yet we're out protesting fascists, not immigrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_German_anti-...

> By the last week of January 2024, the protests had become the biggest in Germany since the protests against the Iraq War in 2003. Soon after, according to some researchers, they had become the biggest in the history of post-war Germany.

German passport grants access to the entire EU. Infinitely better than not having it.

As someone else mentioned, citizens of any EU member country are entitled to live in any other EU (actually EEA) member state.

Now Trump needs to follow through on his election promise to eliminate citizenship based taxation. The US has the ignominy of joining only Eritrea on taxing its citizens no matter where they live, even in those countries that choose higher VAT or other forms of taxation than income based. It leads to truly absurd outcomes and reduces American competitiveness.

Did he actually claim that? Would be a big win for American’s living aboard.

I guess it depends on what he meant by ending “double taxation” of Americans abroad.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/donald-trump-tax-plan-am...

Trump and his boss Musk is cutting Science Research, so people will leave if they are axed.

Plus these days your research needs to agree with stories written thousand of years ago, thus another reason to leave the US.

I want to leave but I have no idea where to go or how to make it work. For now, I think sticking it out in a blue state is a compromise.

inb4 Trump starts deploying military against peaceful protestors. He's already cleaning house in the military, he wanted to do exactly that in 2020, and he's talked about his desire for generals that do whatever he says without question, like "Hitler's generals" (his words).

I'm continually shocked by the Trump apologists on this forum. We can debate right vs left all we want (and there's a ton I hate about both Democrats and progressives), but embracing an authoritarian like Trump makes no sense to me.

If you are a SWE, there are a bunch of jobs that offer visa sponsorship in the EU. You can check the countries that allow double nationality and usually takes 5-6 years to get it, but that probably means learning another language, unless you go to Ireland, where the housing crisis is one of the worst in Europe. The salary is going to be lower, taxes will be higher, but you'll probably have a better quality of life in general. It's all about trade-offs.

I've considered it, but I'm fairly concerned and the situation in Europe as well. Especially with increasing aggression from Russia, the US aligning with Russia, and a weakened NATO. In some ways I wonder if I'm better off in a strong blue US state (especially when my family is still in the states).

I just don't know though, which is what makes this so hard.

> increasing aggression from Russia

yes that's the biggest problem in EU right now lol

It's one of them. Turns out having an aggressive authoritarian dictatorship right next door can be a cause for concern.

I was seriously considering moving to Western Europe during Trump 1. Dodged a bullet there.

Have you actually visited Western Europe recently or is your judgement based on what you read?

Yep, I traveled all over Western EU during Ukraine war

The only exit is a digital exit, and using Linux won't be enough to avoid surveilance from the last 3 Earth Kingdoms after 2025, that will control all consumer electronics. We were able to do a lot with 90's technology, each village should have its own electronics manufacturing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com