Technically, no…but it’s easy to get a Mexican lawyer or similar to sign the papers as the de jure title holder, with the US citizen as a long-term leaseholder and de facto property owner. Less easy to do this within 100 km of the coasts and int’l boundaries, where the restrictions are tougher.
Mea culpa but in all innocence. I’m a New Zealander. When I lived for a few months in Colorado 25 years ago, the term was commonly used. Indeed the guy who was the dishwasher in the Whitespot restaurant I worked at was referred to as a wetback. The word had no negative connotations among those Americans I mixed with.
Speaking for myself, all is forgiven. Interesting story. Although, I wouldn’t be so sure that it had no “negative connotations” 25 years ago, but rather that the Coloradans you met were insensitive to why one might want to avoid using the term. That particular insensitivity IS something which is less common now, I’m pretty sure.
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I’d think that the words migrants and immigration could probably stand a little bit of definition.
In my mind, they describe people who are moving from one country to another permanently for some reason usually economic, religious or political, with hopes of making a living and raising families in the new place. Generally speaking, they work for citizenship or at least resident alien status.
I don’t really look at Americans teaching English in China or Japan or American retirees living in Mexico because it’s cheap as falling under this definition. I suspect the teachers will eventually end up back in the US, and the retirees are almost the reverse of the usual immigrant reasons.
So are there Americans migrating somewhere else in the more traditional manner?
I think there were more such migrations to Mexico in the past (Romney’s Mormon ancestors, for one, or those Americans who were in frontier Mexico in the decades leading up to the Mexican-American War).
There are plenty of US retirees in Panama and other countries of Latin America who take advantage of the lower cost of living, but of course their income is either from pensions or investment income.
Panama is one of the better off countries in Latin America, but the pay scale for equivalent work is far far lower than in the US. Minimum wage is on the order of $10 a day in the city, and lower than that in rural areas. An office secretary might make $500 a month.
In order to be paid a US-scale salary, an American here pretty much has to be working for a US or other international company or agency. Since Panamanians with equivalent training can generally be had for much cheaper pay, these positions are very limited.
[QUOTE=Ken001]
Perhaps because the internet is US dominated there are many articles and discussions about how bad life has become for the average American. I don’t doubt the truth of this on an individual basis but I do wonder just how rational this is.
[/QUOTE]
The thing is, “bad” conditions from the US viewpoint are pretty good from that of many Panamanians. People living at what is considered the poverty level in the US would be lower middle class here.
I emigrated to Spain about a quarter century ago.
There are over 100,000 American immigrants in Israel, among them my parents.
Yes, that is what I thought. I’ve been to a few third world countries, most recently India, and what we think of as poverty in western nations is still far above real poverty.
Having said that if everyone around you has a home, car, job etc and you don’t - even if you have food and money, your poverty is very real for you.
According to this chart there were over 17 thousand people who moved from the U.S. to Israel between 2000 and 2010.
Liberia was for a time
Right after the Civil War, there were refugee communities from the Confederacy in Mexico, Brazil, and other Latin American nations that still had slavery. One of Rosalynn Carter’s ancestors helped found the Confederado settlement in America, Brazil, for instance. But they pretty much all either assimilated quickly, or went back home.
It is my understanding that there are some fundamentalist religious groups that have settled in Latin America and/or Canada. I believe that some polygamist Mormon groups have fled the US, and I believe that there are a number of scattered Amish and or Mennonite groups up and down the Americas, and I would guess that at least some of the members are descendants of people who once lived in the US.