The Expat Experience 3: May I See Your Papers?

You’re getting serious about moving overseas when you start to consider paperwork. Yeah, you can go just about anywhere on a tourist visa. Lots of people ‘forget’ to go home when that visa expires, too. But if you ever have an issue — an injury, a financial disaster, a car accident, war is declared — you may be in deep trouble. If you break the law of the host country, your American passport will not save you — you are subject to the local laws. Believe me, you do not want to get involved with the criminal justice system, anywhere on Earth. Better, if you can do it, to be legal.

So the first step is to go to your dream destination’s web site and look at their regulations. These vary hugely, and change with distressing frequency depending on current events. Covid, for instance, brought a surge of new regulations that may or may not still be in force. The web site may well be confusing, even self-contradictory. Bureaucracy is a bitch, everywhere, but there are some countries that are notoriously hard. France and Italy, for instance, are where red tape was invented.

When we went to France, we planned a nine-month stay. At that period you could go there for three months on a tourist visa, but a longer stay involved a visa. Which meant making an appointment to visit the French embassy in Washington DC. We had to supply proof that we had plenty of money, and health insurance. We also had to get our landlady in France to testify that she was renting to us and that we would therefore not be homeless. Do you get the idea that the French do not want homeless and penniless Americans? Health care is free in France, but they don’t want tourists hopping onto the French gravy train. If you step off the plane and announce you’d like one heart valve surgery, stat, they want you to pay for it.

(You do not want to do this, by the way. You may be a whiz at Duolingo, but if you’re deathly sick, you want the hospital nurse to speak your native tongue. You will need to buy health insurance that will cover you in your foreign country, and they often offer a rider that will ship you home to get treatment in the US.  They offer this rider because people want it. You may want it too.)

If you can’t dope all the requirements out, consider hiring someone to help you manage the transition. This is particularly important if you plan to buy real estate or invest your money over there. You want all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed if you’re going to be paying taxes over there.  Select this person or business with care, checking for references and finding satisfied Americans who have dealt with them. Remember the California couple, in the CNN article linked in #1 of this series? They hired someone, very wise of them. Are you fluent in Japanese or Ghanian or whatever the local language is? Definitely hire someone if you’re not. It’s rough enough to read legal documents in English. To puzzle them out in some other language will make you crazy.

But let’s say that you surmount all these hurdles. This is the big one, all right. But wait, there’s more! Next post!