Barring extreme circumstances‡, one should not moving from the country of one’s birth, but to the country of one’s choice. I emigrated from the U.S. two decades ago to Canada, because of the person who later became my wife—but I had to decide that I could live with Canada, too. Family aside, nothing in the U.S. either held me to America or was pushing me from America.
The process took almost two years, and it was almost five years before I got Canadian citizenship. As I understand it, it would take longer now.
My wife and I are considering moving to Europe or the U.K., but it would take time for this move to materialize, and we need to figure out what it is that we want (especially given our ages). Such a move is not likely to happen for two to five years at this point.
‡ There are exigent circumstances where it becomes safer to leave one country with little care for where one goes, as long as it isn’t worse. I fear with the extremists taking power legitimately and illegitimately and pushing toward their increasingly apartheid goals, there will be larger classes of people who could legitimately become refugees from America, especially if "liberal" states turn extremist—as they seem likely to do, since the divide here is (mostly old, mostly white) rural vs (mostly younger, mostly diverse) urban.
Sitting where I sit, I truly think that America is fucked, and am doing what little that I can to make sure that Canada does not follow in its footsteps, but we have our homegrown extremists whose crypto-christo-fascist messages are being treated with bemusement to respect, and even being promoted by fools like Poilievre.
Yeah, to be clear, I'm not running away from America. I'm in a similar situation where my partner wants to move to Germany (in a couple years), and I think that sounds like a swell idea.
Barring extreme circumstances‡, one should not moving from the country of one’s birth, but to the country of one’s choice. I emigrated from the U.S. two decades ago to Canada, because of the person who later became my wife—but I had to decide that I could live with Canada, too. Family aside, nothing in the U.S. either held me to America or was pushing me from America.
The process took almost two years, and it was almost five years before I got Canadian citizenship. As I understand it, it would take longer now.
My wife and I are considering moving to Europe or the U.K., but it would take time for this move to materialize, and we need to figure out what it is that we want (especially given our ages). Such a move is not likely to happen for two to five years at this point.
‡ There are exigent circumstances where it becomes safer to leave one country with little care for where one goes, as long as it isn’t worse. I fear with the extremists taking power legitimately and illegitimately and pushing toward their increasingly apartheid goals, there will be larger classes of people who could legitimately become refugees from America, especially if "liberal" states turn extremist—as they seem likely to do, since the divide here is (mostly old, mostly white) rural vs (mostly younger, mostly diverse) urban.
Sitting where I sit, I truly think that America is fucked, and am doing what little that I can to make sure that Canada does not follow in its footsteps, but we have our homegrown extremists whose crypto-christo-fascist messages are being treated with bemusement to respect, and even being promoted by fools like Poilievre.
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