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.
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i’'m tired of people complaining about bigoted america and “how i want to move to liberal europe”. move that lazy ass and topple that idiot in the white house and the system that makes him possible (yes, that means ditching the democrat party too).
Reading the list, NZ does pretty well… Right to the end…
- good treatment of mentally ill, homeless and impoverished people…
We don’t do that here
I heard people say Australia and New Zealand outright bans the physically and mentally disabled from obtaining citizenship. How true is that?
Nothing about it in the official checks but there may be biases against various disabilities.
- good treatment of mentally ill, homeless and impoverished people…
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.
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.
It’s important to consider trends and trajectories, while countries like Ireland and whatnot may appear to satisfy a lot of these, they are also struggling with the same decaying Capitalist system and are being dragged down by US decay as well. Countries like China that are improving rapidly might be more worth considering.
China would get a -100/10 for privacy though.
About the same score as any Western country. Privacy isn’t really respected anywhere unless you force it yourself, too much money in big data.
In China it’s illegal to be private though. Skynet, the surveillance system is always watching you when your in public. You have to use phones thay are regulated by the government and you can’t have access to websites thay aren’t whitlisted by the government unless you use a vpn which as far as I know is illegal in China.
Western countries have similar levels of surveilance and regulation. The firewall and VPN bit is true, but that’s not for privacy so much as it is the desire to build up their own internet that can’t be dominated by the US. They are very wary of how western countries used propaganda to destabilize the USSR with outlets like Radio Free Europe.
ITT: A lot of people doing the typical StackOverflow thing of asserting the question is bad and answering a different question instead.
No country’s that great but Canada’s doing aight.
Thanks for understanding, I do feel a bit hurt by some insinuations in some responses, but I understand why citizens of the world would feel unhappy with whiny Americans right now. I just hope it doesn’t progress into a hatred. Many of my fellow Americans are very good people, but unfortunately we are so disenfranchised politically - I think it’s hard to convey the extent of it. The state of things here isn’t a result of laziness and unwillingness to participate. But in fairness, I didn’t refine my original post deeply and it came off not quite right. I’m not looking to selfishly abandon ship or become a silent drain on another country. I would love to build community, but it’s certainly easier in some places than others, for a wide variety of reasons.
