Have Any Liberals Left the USA As They Promised Before Elections?
December 14, 2017
Alex Henderson, Periodista and Technical Writer
Over the years, I've known plenty of American liberal expatriates (and some conservative expatriates as well) who left the U.S., made a permanent move to another country and never looked back. However, it wasn't one political event that inspired the move to Europe, Canada, Australia or somewhere else. In some cases, they moved for work and decided they were better off in their adopted home. This was especially true if they were older, had some type of "preexisting condition" and realized that returning to the U.S. would be a death sentence at the hands of vampiric health insurance companies.
Whenever some Republican, Fox News-watching rube or yahoo says, "'Murica, love it or leave it," I laugh because: (1) they obviously know nothing about the strict immigration laws in other developed countries, and (2) these are the same idiots who like to run around waving Confederate flags and are too dumb to see the contradiction.
Although Donald Trump is easily the worst president of my lifetime (even worse than George W. Bush, which is saying a lot), the American middle class was circling the drain long before Trump decided to run for the president. Thanks to Reaganomics, neoliberalism, corporatism, the Prison/Industrial Complex, outsourcing, union busting, banksters, medical bankruptcies, sky-high college tuition and many other horrors, the U.S. has long since become a country of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%. The more the advances of the New Deal and the Great Society have been weakened, the worse life has become for most of the U.S. population. So it is not surprising that so many expatriates have no desire to return to this mess, and that others would like to join them abroad.
Moving abroad, however, is much easier said than done. The immigration laws in Europe are much more difficult for U.S. citizens than they were 30 or 40 years ago.
Tina Turner became a citizen of Switzerland several years ago and formally renounced her U.S. citizenship. But then, Tina Turner is incredibly wealthy (her net worth is around $250 million, according to Forbes). She had the resources to make a permanent move to Europe, unlike millions of Americans. And even if one does have a lot of money in the bank, European immigration laws are notoriously difficult for U.S. citizens. Nor is it easy for U.S. citizens to move to Australia, New Zealand or Canada.
New Zealand, for example, has strict age and health requirements. If you're 56 or older, you are too old to apply for a work visa in New Zealand, although you could apply for retirement status if you have sufficient funds (meaning one could be a legal resident, but not work legally).
So the painful reality is that no matter how bad things become in the Trump era, millions of Americans are stuck in this nightmare with no way out.
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