With all the dismal news about America lately, my home, I’m starting to seriously look at where else to move.
Putting aside for now the difficulty of actually immigrating to some countries, I’m curious on the opinions of others (especially people living outside the U.S) on this.
What I’m looking for in a country is, I imagine, similar to many people. I’m trying to find somewhere that will exhibit:
- Low racism
- Low sexism
- Low LGBTQ-phobia
- Strong laws around food quality and safety
- Strong laws about environmental protection
- Strong laws against unethical corporate practices (monopoly, corruption, lobbying, etc)
- Strong laws for privacy
- Good treatment of mentally ill, homeless, and impoverished people
Those are the real important things. Of course the nice-to-haves are almost too obvious to be worth listing, low cost of living, strong art and cultural scene, nice environment, and so on.
My actual constraints that might really matter are that I only speak English (and maybe like A1-2 level German). It seems incredibly intimidating to try to find employment somewhere when I can hardly speak the language.
I know nowhere on Earth is perfect, just curious what people may have to suggest. I hope this question isn’t too selfish to ask here.
The Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia have all those things and people tend to speak English really well.
As for the ‘No racism’ part, skip the Netherlands. One of the current governing parties is openly racist and can even be considered fascist. Also, we have a huge housing crisis, so finding a place to live may be challenging.
European racism is casual compared to even everyday American racism, even considering the likes of AfD
Yes, I’ve had this suspicion awhile. Last year an ex-coworkerif mine was quoting the disproportionate crime rate among black people statistics at me and then leveled up into saying Africa is such a desolate place and so only unintelligent people would have stayed there in ancient times, thus meaning there’s a selective breeding for unintelligence in that continent. I tried to argue with him about the dubiousness of IQ measures in the first place, let alone IQ heritability, and the deep statistical flaws in the crime rate argument, which don’t disentangle race from poverty, but as soon as I tried to make these counterarguments he brushed me off as being “brainwashed” by “lies about equality”.
I don’t even know what to do about something like that other than just stop talking to the person. What’s terrifying is he’s otherwise pretty smart, totally fits in with respectable society. Not some stereotypical redneck racist type. I think about that a lot and wonder how many others like him are going totally undetected around me every day.
Yeah, racism in europe is largely stereotypes directed at whole groups that are rooted in truth but grossly overblown, eg “black people just want to commit crime”, “arabs want to install sharia”, “east asians want to eat your dog”, “indians want to outgrow the native population” and other nonsense.
If you ask the huge majority of the people who are saying these things if they interact with people in these groups, they’ll say “yes, but they’re some of the good ones” not realising it’s only a tiny fraction who aren’t, but also accepting that race doesn’t automatically make you anything.
Comparing that to the US where (from what I’m aware of) there’s both “I refuse to even speak to members of xyz race because they’re subhuman” and “xyz race needs all the help they can get because they have such a tough time” it seems so hard for individuals to just live a normal life in the US?
I agree. The difference is that we are not so polarized (yet, we are getting there) and it’s not systemically embedded in the police force (yet, depends where you look)
Thanks for this counterpoint, that’s exactly the sort of thing I think people need to see when thinking about moving (whether emigrating from America or anywhere else) - what’s the big problems for people there, what’s their equivalent of these problems. Would you mind telling me which party this is so I can do some more research on it?
The party is called the PVV. Their racism is mostly aimed at Muslims, but they’re not a big fan of most other groups of immigrants either. Highly educated expats with a work visa largely get a pass, though I think there are some plans to limit their benefits.
I wouldn’t rely on Germany to remain stable and democratic these days. The fascists are the strongest party and the new chancellor is an oligarchy stooge of the worst kind.
Things aren’t much better in The Netherlands. The PVV is part of the government now. The good news is that having to form a coalition with other parties, seems to have reigned in some of their worst tendencies. Also, their minister of immigration is a total nitwit that can’t get any sort of actual policy implemented. If they keep failing to make any kind of progress on this issue, hopefully they won’t do as well in the next election.
It certainly seems that way! Some of the ESL speakers I’ve met from Europe are more articulate than native speakers that I work with. What I most wonder about is the prevalence of English in the workplace. I think I’d feel guilty using English at work in country with its own different official language, unless it was really like, standard even before “the guy from America” joined the team, lol.
There are some large, internationally oriented companies where you can get by speaking only English. I’ve also seen more than one tech company hire programmers that don’t speak Dutch. So it depends on the industry.
If you want to get some perspectives from Americans living in the Netherlands, you could check out Itz Sky’s and Jordan Green’s channels on YouTube.