They went to Casablanca for the waters.
I figured, since it’s been 23 years since I was living in that status and my memory is a bit fuzzy on the details. The part about people hanging out in Mexico to avoid losing the status is accurate, however.
I’m a Canadian expat living in the UK the last 11 years and I know I don’t want to go back. It has nothing to do with money…it’s far more expensive to live here than in Canada. I like it here. The government is fucked up, people drink too much, there’s a certain subset who rely far too much on public money but I like it here anyway. I’m fortunate to live a relatively comfortable lifestyle and get to travel a fair bit. I think we’ve given our children a good life experience growing up here. I feel more at home here than I do back “home”. Having said that, my husbands says that if Ed Miliband gets elected, we’re outta here. Can’t imagine for a moment why he would think Stephen Harper was a better option :-/
My experience with American expats here in London is that by and large they find it difficult to live outside of their comfort zone and they can’t wait to get back home.
I was an English teacher in Japan for a while after college, but didn’t stay longterm and never intended to – and the same was true of nearly all the other foreign teachers I met during my time there. The only person I’ve heard from who’s still in Japan is the guy who trained me, and he was already married to a Japanese woman and pretty settled in back when I knew him. One of the other teachers from my school came back to the US for a year or so then returned to Japan and taught for several more years, but she returned to the States for grad school and is still here.
So based just on people I know, I’d say it’s actually pretty rare even for Americans who have worked overseas to stay there permanently.
Adam Gopnik apparently spent several years in France and wrote about the joys and bummers of moving back to the US (Manhattan) in The Children’s Gate. Being the writer he is, he made me feel the issues pretty strongly. Recommended for anyone pondering this thread.
As long as you brought this up, there is something to be said about the kind of person who goes abroad and remains there. I would think the vast majority are/were adventurous and wanted to see a bit of the world and then discovered that things were different, but equally if not better than back “at home”. These people are likely to remain abroad and become the eternal ex-pat.
But watching House Hunters International, I see lots of people moving for silly reasons, or for reasons that have nothing to do with adventure as much as obligation - family or work. These are the idiots who show up in Europe expecting to find the same sprawling ranch style house with a two acre backyard as they had in Butthole, Texas and bitch and moan about tiny fridges and no four car garage and expect to pay $60,000 to get what they want in the center of London or Paris or Rome or Madrid or wherever.
Apparently they feel they can move half way around the world, but didn’t think of perhaps Googling to see what the current price of homes/apartments are in their destination city.
Back on topic - while living in Berlin, I would meet ex-pats that you would never guess were not born in Berlin. They had integrated so well that they fit in like the proverbial glove and would often not even mention they were from a different country until you got to know them better.
BTW, some of you might be surprised to know that I did meet quite a few ex-US military guys who got out of the service and parked their asses right down in Berlin and other parts of Germany and Europe and never went back to the US. One might think that someone who just spent four or more years in the Armed Forces in a foreign country would happily return to the US after they got out - but those that I met said they joined to see the world - liked what they saw - and stayed.
From distant climes, o’er wide-spread seas, we come,
Though not with much éclat or beat of drum,
True patriots all: for, be it understood:
We left our country for our country’s good.
George Barrington
I lived in England, then moved back to the States. Then years later I live in Poland for a few years, then moved back to the States. Then I lived in Germany, and moved back to the States.
Maybe the ex-pats you meet aren’t a representative sample.
Ex-expats
Honest question for those who have done it:
What’s the best way to go about the process of beginning to become an American expat?
I’ve wanted to move out of the US for years, and I’m really, really hopeful that I’ll somehow be able to get the ball rolling once I get out of college, which should hopefully happen in the next two-four years. Just curious to see how you guys went about doing it.
My understanding is one very good way is to become fluent in French and move to Quebec. But I’ve never really looked into becoming an expat.
- Peace Corps - Pros: worldwide, logistically easy for recent grads compared to other options, you don’t need any special skills. Cons: competitive and very complicated application process, possibility of danger depending on assignment, poverty.
- the JET Program - Pros: Japan. Cons: Japan.
- Teaching English overseas at private language schools. Pros: potentially higher paying than PC, more likely to land you in a city rather than the ass-end of nowhere. Cons: demand is only in a few regions, you have to be wary of scammers, you need a certification (from what I hear, the jobs that will take you without one are sketchsville).
- International transfer by domestic employer. Pros: awesome Cons: a lot more rare than you’d think by the way people talk about it
- Highly skilled migrant - are you a doctor, nurse or veterinarian? Good news! You can immigrate almost anywhere.
- Working Holiday - the US didn’t used to participate in this program (which sucked) but you can now get a working Holiday visa and live/work legally for up to a year with our drunk but charming cousin, Australia.
I’m one of the ones who ended up in Thailand. But I do not fit your narrow-minded premise, and I know many others here who also do not. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this Board and more than once, I ended up here through circumstances. I actually first arrived here while working for the US government. And I did return to the US after that initial stint in Thailand and lived there again for four years. In that time, although I meant to return to Thailand anyway, I met my future Thai wife as a fellow student at the University of Hawaii. We returned to Thailand together. The biggest reason we’re still here is her career. She is a C9-level civil servant, a fairly senior position, and I am proud to say she has done some good work for her country.
We do occasionally kick around the idea of retiring back in Hawaii. Whether we do or not remains to be seen. But I am certainly not one of these expats who left America, Britain etc “because it’s all fucked up” etc. Admittedly, there are plenty of those here, but you paint too broad a picture with your brush. I like America just fine and have every faith in its future. In the meantime, I have stuff to do over here, life is pretty good, and there is as yet simply no reason for me to pull up stakes and go back to America. But I certainly would have no qualms about doing so.
EDIT: I personally have known quite a few fellow Americans who did return to live in the US.
^ Those (referring to Hello Again’s post) are probably the best and easiest legal ways to do it. If you want to be completely above board, that’s what you do.
There’s also Bunac, which I did midway through my junior year in Scotland before moving abroad to Hungary after I graduated. That (like a working holiday) is temporary, though.
I’m not terribly good for this advice, as if you’re young and energetic, I would just say, go abroad, make some contacts in the expat community, and figure it out, legal or not. That was not an unusual path for many of the expats I met to take.
Likewise. I first came to Panama to do research for my doctoral thesis in the 1970s. I started to come back again for various projects in the late 1980s. I finally returned for a one year temporary assignment in 1992. I’m still here, and I’ll probably retire here.
While the US is screwed up in many ways, Panama is also screwed up in a variety of different ways. I didn’t come here to escape from the US, but because of the climate and environment.
One thing I find amusing is people who live in a country for years, have no intention of going back, but still think of themselves as “ex-pats”. Dude… you’re not an ex-pat. You’re an immigrant.
I first lived in Japan in 1981, so 33 years ago. I’ve met thousands of expats over the years.
Perhaps I’ve lived a sheltered expat life, but I’ve met zero Americans who moved abroad specifically because they felt that America was too fucked up. I know a number, myself included, who don’t like specific things about America, but I think it was take an Überpatriot to have lived in a foreign culture and not thought of at least one area which the other culture gets right. I know far more people who spend their time bitching about the host country. I also know a hell of a lot more Americans, living in America and on both sides of the political divide, who believe that America is fucked up.
Over the years, I say that more than 90% of the expats I’ve met have gone back. Some stay for various reasons, among the bigger reasons is that they get married and develop more roots. Or they like their job or the people or the lifestyle.
Not that easy. There’s some places where you’re never really accepted as an immigrant. Also, most of the really long-term expats I’ve met have sort of fallen into that. I’m like that. I had thought I’d be in Japan for five years, then it got to be longer and longer. Then at some point, I figured I stay for much longer, but I didn’t really think of myself as an immigrant.
Of course, then I moved to Taiwan.
I’m not exactly sure where the division is, but that’s about right to me.
To me, the connotation involved with the term “expat” is one of coming from a roughly equally or more prosperous country to the host country. “Immigrant” generally connotes one coming to a host country they perceive more opportunity in. Like, in Hungary, the folks coming from the UK and US were “expats.” Those coming from, I dunno, Romania and China were “immigrants.”
In other words, “expat” to me feels like a sense of “well, I don’t have to be here but I want to,” while “immigrant” feels to me like “I need to be here, I don’t have enough opportunities back home” or something of that nature.
I disagree - I think it’s nothing more than unconscious racism. “I’m an American, not some dirty immigrant.”
Well, I don’t know about “racism,” but, yes, I was kind of alluding to what you’re trying to describe in my post–and it’s not explicit to Americans by any stretch. That’s the whole “more prosperous country” bullshit I was trying to explain without having to get into the nitty gritty of this type of discussion.