I haven’t bothered to total the numbers but here’s the general gist of it and some numbers from 2016, the latest year available. The number of immigrants from Norway to the US is essentially zip, 22,669 out a total immigration of 43,738,901, or 0.05% of total immigration that year, and from a quick eyeballing that is the smallest number of any country that is individually identified – compare, say, to immigration from China at 2,519,964 and India at 2,205,912. The number is small enough that corporate transfers and other job-related necessity probably accounts for almost all of it. Norwegians seem to prefer Norway.
The rest would fall under “graduate school” and “to be with SO”, according to my left elbow. Note that the data does not refer to people who acquired US citizenship, but to people of X nationality who were not US citizens and were residing in the US; that is, it includes people going there for things such as a year-long student exchange.
I should point out that the relative raw numbers of people who emigrate from country X to country Y and those who emigrate from country Y to country X don’t prove much. Given that the population of the U.S. in 2016 was about 323,100,000 and the population of Norway in 2016 was about 5,213,000, this would mean that about 1,603/323,100,000 = .000496131% of the people in the U.S. moved to Norway and about 1,114/5,213,000 = 0.021369652% of the people in Norway moved to the U.S. in that year. So if you looked at the percentage of the population rather than the raw number, you could claim that it was 43 times as common for Norwegians as Americans to emigrate to the other country.
This proves nothing except what the relative populations of the countries presently are. Look at the populations in 1900 instead. At that point the population of Norway was about 2,231,000 and the population of the U.S. was about 76,212,000. So at that point the U.S. had about 34 times as many people as Norway, as opposed to about 61 times as many people that the U.S. has today than Norway has today. The amount of land in the U.S. is about 26 times as much as in Norway. So the U.S. has gone from being slightly more populated per area to being noticeably more populated per area from 1900 to 2016.
As has already been pointed out, the shifts of people today between the U.S. and Norway are probably mostly about where a couple decides to live after getting married when one is American and one is Norwegian and the cases where someone in a corporate job moves from one country to the other.
Generally, I’d expect the threshold for moving from Norway to the US is lower than the other way around.
Norwegians learn English in school from an early age, and are generally fluent. Furthermore, US TV shows and movies transmit at least a superficial understanding of the culture. An American moving to Norway won’t generally have either of these advantages.
Yeah, but we have almost 100x as many people, so looking at raw numbers is meaningless (5M people vs 300M). On a percent basis, there is much more immigration from Norway than to Norway. That is to say, your average Norwegian is much more likely to emigrate to the US than the average American is likely to emigrate to Norway.
John Mace, did you not notice that I said almost exactly the same thing in post #43, except that I bothered to look up the numbers so that I could say that the population of the U.S. is about 61 times as much instead of just “almost 100x as many.”
So most everyone in Norway speaks English and American culture is rampant in Norway. How is that a disadvantage for Americans moving to Norway?
On topic: Ikke faen i hælvete om jeg noengang flytter til Amerika. Om hælvete fryser til is, så flytter jeg heller dit. Der har de i det minste et mer forståelig politisk system.
Looking at it as a “per capita” thing though is still oversimplifying. The Americans are moving to a tiny economy, the Norwegians are moving to a giant one. A convenient proxy for total precision might be to look at percentages of overall emigration.
Moving to a place where you don’t understand the written signs, including the labels on food, can be a bit of a bitch. And unless you’ve got personal anchors, it’s easy to end up isolated.
Mind you: one of my coworkers in Sweden, a Spaniard like me, one time took to telling me that if I lived in the bigger town like he did instead of staying in the little village where we worked, I would have been able to make friends.
I asked him, ok, you’ve lived here 20 years, how many friends do you and your wife have.
He thought, got a sad look and went back to his desk.
Norwegians don’t have as much of a reputation of being “more closed than a rock” as Swedes do, but they’re in the family…
The OP is right in that Norwegians have little reason to move to the US. The couple I did know only moved here because of a unique job opportunity.
Now Haitians, you cant blame them for not wanting to leave that … Well what word would YOU use for that place? Probably the same word you would use for many bad areas of the USA like East St. Louis.
To avoid getting “immigrated” confused with “changed residence for a while due to job, love or studying” I looked up the Department of Homeland Security’s statistics for naturalizations. 93 Norwegians became citizens of the US in 2016, 28 of them over-65s.
I looked up some nations of roughly similar size, Costa Rica, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand and Slovakia. The number of nationalizations ranged from 3x more for Singapore, to almost 15 x more for Ireland. The fraction of over-65s getting naturalized among these groups ranged from 1/10th to 1/20th of the total.
Nah. Either swear like a civilized person, or go the full mile. Perhaps something like this:
Ikkje han tykje i grønnheiteste hælvette om æ nån gang fløtte te ferpulte Ammerika. Om så hælvette sku’ frys te is, så fløtte æ heller dit, så kainn dåkk sitt der og tørr-runke te kuken dætt av dokker. Der ne’ e’ de no ikvertfaill mulig for ein stakkars dækel å skjønn meir enn eitt ferbainna kushår av det satans politiske systemet dæm har.
(apologies for the text, it’s only a weak approximation of what a true master from rural northern Norway would be capable of delivering)
Could you two provide translations? I realize they’re going to be approximate, but even if they’re nowhere near as colorful as the original they’ll be better than google translate. All I understand is something along the lines of “wouldn’t want to go there even after Hell freezes over, their damned political system is a bloody incomprehensible mess anyway”.
