The Expat Experience 1: Fly Like an Eagle

Current events have brought out the quadrennial dreams of life elsewhere. Couldn’t we blow this pop stand? Leave the United States? Move to that Paradise in some other country? Most of these wishes are no more than that — daydreams of going to where’s there’s a place for us. There is nothing wrong with this. We none of us were made for these times. Tolkien tells us that escapism is the proper reaction when you’re in a bad place.

It’s when you try to make the dream a reality that the difficulties start. I have lived overseas for years, on and off, because my father was a US diplomat. So I can tell you how to do it. But prepare yourself for a long process. You are not considering an easy thing.

The hard fact, either unspoken or overt, is that nations only want the right incomers, people (sometimes of a specific ethnicity, color, or religion) who can add to the nation. No polity wants arrivals in need of money, housing, and health care. If boatloads of indigent foreigners arrive, the native-born tend to get discontented — God knows Americans do, and nasty reactions are common in the Euro zone as well.

Therefore, the most important qualification for an easy one-way trip elsewhere is assets. If you are a wealthy business owner, you can go anywhere. Not a millionaire? It still helps to have some money.  A modest income in the US may be riches in the right part of the world. Retirees with plump IRAs and generous pensions are popular, because they spend money but don’t take jobs from locals. If you have no assets, then useful career training, and the youth and health that promise a long working career can be nearly as good. Doctors, nurses, and dentists are nearly always welcome worldwide, and you would be surprised how big a demand there is for accountants. Apply for a job from here, and when you get hired in Portugal or Mauritius your transfer will be easy.

If they let you in with zero money, housing or assets, you are probably entering as a refugee. This is a rough way to go, hardly ever a pleasant experience. So let’s say you are not that desperate. You are in the middle, not a millionaire but not broke, starving, and desperate. You have time to do this better, wiser, in a more organized way. Whew, great! You have many more options if you legally emigrate.

And it’s much more fun to consider the first thing: where do you want to go? You could make a list. Sunshine? Cuisine? A safe political climate is probably a given. Health care system, yeah, you want that. With even a short list like this, you can start eliminating possibilities. The tropics are hot; Iceland is dark a lot of the year; hospitals are thin on the ground in Outer Mongolia.

A key thing to consider is language. There are places where English is widely spoken, sure. Almost everybody in Europe speaks a little English; people will stop you in the streets of Beijing and try to practice their English on you. Give a second look at places where you already can speak the language. Even a smattering of childish Japanese, or the Arabic you picked up from your grandmother thirty years ago, will be a valuable boost.

Failing that, and unless you’re considering Britain or Australasia, you’re going to want to pick up the main language as fast as you can. Sign up for Duolingo and start learning French or Korean as soon as possible. If you can scrape up a minimal competence you at least can shop in stores and read the road signs. Unless you’re amazingly gifted, you may have to accept you’re never going to be fluent in your new language. Asian languages and their tonality are especially hard to pick up in adulthood. If you aren’t fluent and literate, you’re always a foreigner, always on the outside.

Which brings us to my main point. Can you live with that? Would it be okay with you, to never get a grip on the local sports, to be always ignorant of current affairs? Being isolated from the main flow of the community is surprisingly hard — like a Covid quarantine that doesn’t end. We are a social species. You are leaving your home and going to where it is not home, where it may never be home. There’s a psychological cost to emigrating. US diplomats and their families get home leave every several tours, precisely because of this. We come back to the US and whew, it’s suddenly no longer an act of concentration, to read menus or street signage. A stress, an unspoken strain, is gone. It’s a relief.

Have a look at this recent article from CNN. The rich American couple moved to the south of France, wow! Goodbye, San Francisco! But … they were unhappy. They were so miserable that they’re moving back. What went wrong? One major error, the wife confesses, was not learning French. She discovered that the insular French don’t want to speak English to her, and she never made any friends or put down any roots. (Read her complaint about supermarket produce. Oh honey, everyone in France knows you go to the weekly markets for veg.) They were homesick and unable to adapt.

Consider well, whether you can successfully transplant yourself and your family, and start prepping now. Next post: how to begin that.