You can but try. There are some anti-immigrant feelings and subsequent laws, but it shouldn’t be hard for an American.
Malta is highest on my list. It looks like it checks all my boxes. Lots of English speakers is part of it.
Malta is pretty great; we are considering retiring there. However, be aware of the downsides. It’s on the poor side for Europe (despite the financial shenanigans that make up a fair portion of its economy), and its development is, let’s say, uneven. And being on an island where any travel requires at minimum an hour on a plane or several hours on a ferry is a significant inconvenience for long term residency. Plus, politically, they’re in a sustained shitshow which is unlikely to abate. If you know what you’re getting into, it’s worth considering.
Umm. With global warming those Canadian refugee camps will have the same climate in a few decades as the camps in Mexico have now!
I understand that anyone who can make it to Svalbard is entitled to stay, no visa required. Seems like it could be a nice place in as the world gets warmer…
I knew about the travel issues, but a Ferry to Italy is a pretty nice way to travel.
I didn’t know about the Political issues. I’ll have to look into that and/or start another thread.
One of the reasons I was pretty sanguine about leaving is the knowledge that my ancestors didn’t decide to “stay and fight,” but got on that boat as soon as they could scrape up the fare. Some of them (the Swedes and the Swiss, in particular) don’t seem to have made the right choice, long term, because they’d ultimately have been better off with much less cultural compromise where they were; others probably intended to go back and never did.
As the descendant of immigrants, I figure, what could be more American than moving abroad for a better life?
But the long months with no sun are not going to get any shorter.
How are they doing that and, more important, why?
Well… not always foresight. The great-grands and grands on dad’s side fled the pogroms and cursed the Tsar and his men… but it turned out they did us a favor 'cause those that didn’t leave due to the pogroms didn’t survive WWII.
Not sure if the Jews are going to get swept up in the mess (again) or not if things go sideways.
My genetic patriline suggests that that particular group of ancestors sat in the same little corner of Europe from the Last Glacial Maximum until the early 20th century. I hate moving 
.
To answer the OP - honestly, probably nothing would make me emigrate. It’s not from any excess of sunny optimism, either. But there is whole laundry list of whys including age, financial considerations, geography, skills or lack thereof (both language and job), lack of children, etc…
Ultimately I’m modestly comfortable and reasonably sheltered from what I perceive to be the the worst negatives of current American society to the point where it just doesn’t make practical sense. From my POV at my age it is better to just play out the string. At work there has been a push for a reorganization that I would find both foolish, frustrating and personally inconvenient. My modest goal in the moment is if I can’t argue it away with logic (no one is listening), is to come up with/hope for enough practical roadblocks that it isn’t implemented until after I retire. Not exactly ambitious, but the least painful option as I see it. I view U.S. citizenship in much the same light in my darker moments (though unlike some, I still have the occasional flash of guarded rather than sunny optimism).
Why? To save money. How is more complicated. Any newly minted doctor who moves to Montreal gets only 70% of the standard pay (which is based on fee-for-service). This policy was originally implemented to encourage doctors to practice in poorly served rural areas. But it has continued for literally decades and now Montreal is poorly served and still very few doctors are allowed to come here. There are foreign doctors here driving Ubers because they are not allowed to practice till they done a residency here and the number of residencies allowed to be occupied by foreign trained doctors is limited to a handful every year. About five years ago, the province put together a very lucrative early retirement package for nurses and a great many took it. Since the pandemic started they offered retired nurses a nice bonus to come back (so it ended up costing them a pretty penny). All this in the face of a totally predictable increase in the percentage of elders, owing to the precipitous decline in the French Canadian birth rate. Of course, the pandemic has only exacerbated the situation.
It seems to me that this thread should titled “American Dopers, what would make you (WANT TO) emigrate from the US?”
Also, what if the polar ice cap keeps melting?
Family responsibilities make it very unlikely we would go anytime soon – even though the fact that one of our three children is a UK dual citizen, and one an Israeli dual citizen, hints at options.
My wife and I are both 66. In theory, if we sold all our assets this year, we could manage it, at least in one of the lower income democracies. But I’m pretty sure that if it got bad enough we almost all wanted to go, it would be too late.
I guess it is possible that a real dictatorship would allow fully free emigration, but that’s not usually how it works. I also wonder if we could ever again see those we left behind. The same events that would convince most of us it was time to go would make it much harder than today to do so, both financially and emotionally. I doubt a real dictatorship would let us take financial assets (and, once they got the idea that expats doesn’t like Trumpers, they wouldn’t send social security payments abroad).
Now is the time to go if you are serious. But my plan, in event of President Trump Jr. for Life, is to stay and non-violently, and to the extent possible without winding up in a camp, resist.
Somehow I think that in countries as rich as this, dictatorships are bearable. If they close the Washington Post and New York Times, there’s always VPN, right? Or is tech coming that will make that stoppable?
We could all get boats, tie up together in international waters, and create Cecilvania.
I was telling Mrs. L that apparently you can retire in Panama on only $26K per year, but she says that she suspects leaving the USA will put social security checks etc. in danger. She’s convinced that the younger folks are going to stick it to the boomers. IIRC the official money in Panama is the USD and the official language in Belize is English.
To answer the OP, you’d have to ask my bride. I’d leave before she would, but at the moment she isn’t ready to leave the US and may never be.
What would it take for me to emigrate from the US? A decent job offer, which is why I’m now coming up on my three-year anniversary of living in Canada.
If my parents were already dead and Australia or New Zealand would have me, it might not take much more suckage on the home front to send me packing. If they wouldn’t have me but some other civilized country, presumably with less good diving, would, I’d have to have some well-founded, non-speculative concerns for my personal safety and freedom to leave. Here in Los Angeles, I feel at least somewhat insulated from the worst of what I see happening in the rest of the country. For instance, I’m very concerned about Roe v Wade, but I feel pretty confident I’ll always be able to get an abortion here.
Would this matter? Aren’t social security checks direct deposited these days? We de-immigrated my mother back to Canada (she was inclined to stay in the US, but for aging / health reasons it was more sensible to be near us than thousands of miles from family), and her US Social Security checks go into her US bank account just fine.
The only problem is that you can’t access the Social Security website from outside the US, which is really annoying.
Edit: she does have to maintain a P.O. Box in the US as an address for some retirement investment correspondence. There might be a rule that you have to maintain a US residence, but I don’t really know how that works. In theory Canada will credit my contributions to U.S. Social Security when I retire now that I’m vested in the system here, so I won’t have to worry about it.
AIUI lots of people retire to other countries and have direct deposit to accounts in the US. Mrs L is more afraid that they’ll write legislation to somehow screw expats out of it. Ten years ago I would have thought that impossible, but then we had Trump get elected etc.
SHHHHHHH!!!1!!11!!
Don’t tell everyone my secret plans, all the good spots will be gone before I get there😂