By
Lisa Balkin
August
8, 2019
Frightened
by shootings and appalled at Trump, some Americans are moving abroad
Eleanor
Pelta has secured Polish passports for herself and her two sons. Stephanie
Schwab is planning an escape route via Spain. Elie Jacobs has begun to keep
enough cash on hand to buy last-minute plane tickets to Israel for his family.
Alex and Aussa Lorens are applying for work visas in Australia, while Josh
Lewin is aiming for New Zealand.
And
Kami Lewis Levin already has her bags packed and tickets purchased. She leaves
next week, with her husband, three children and a dog, for a new home in Costa
Rica.
Americans
are not flocking to the exits, but some of them are thinking about it, and some
are talking about it, and at least a few are acting on the idea. Google
searches for terms like “how to move out of America” spiked this past weekend
to levels not seen since November 2016, right after the presidential election,
and last seen a decade ago during the Great Recession. And in dozens of
interviews after the massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, people who
were born here spoke of their crystallizing desire to leave.
These
are not recent immigrants who feel threatened by nationalist rhetoric coming
from the White House and Congress, but for the most part middle-class or
relatively affluent Americans disheartened by the turn in American politics
since the 2016 election. And it is not necessarily Canada — the default
destination for agitated Americans over the decades — where they are
threatening to move, because work visa qualifications there are tight. Instead,
they are casting a larger net across the globe.
“The
text-message threads and FB message threads have surged with questions about
how and when to leave,” said Jacobs, a 41-year-old public affairs consultant
who lives in New Jersey with his wife and toddler, and who began looking to
Israel as an “escape hatch” as soon as Donald Trump was elected, but whose
stockpiling of cash took on new urgency this week.
For
many, the exploration of the departure gates is a direct response to the
current president of the United States and his party. Before 2016, Coloradans
Alex and Aussa Lorens were saving up to buy a house; after that they turned
their attention to qualifying for a 190 Skilled Nominated visa for Australia,
which requires proving English proficiency, a skills assessment and an
“expression of intent” letter to those Australian states that are specifically
looking for workers in Alex’s industry, which is hospitality.
Among
what the couple sees as the many attractions of Australian society — including
universal health care and affordable private insurance, mandated parental
leave, four weeks of vacation for all workers and strong limits on guns — the
Lorenses are drawn by the political culture, which, Aussa says, “protects them
from a Trump-like outcome.”
“They
do not have a major political party that is at all equivalent to our far-right
Republicans,” she says. “Their conservative party is more like the moderate
Democrats. They don’t argue about whether health care is a basic human right or
whether climate change is real. They banned guns after a mass shooting.”
For
others, the motivation is what they describe as an increasing level of daily
fear.
“The
way things are going, it’s to where you can’t even take your family out in public
because it’s just a matter of time,” says Josh Lewin, 34, a native of
Murfreesboro, Tenn., who lives there now with his wife and four sons ages 4 to
14 and works selling commercial security systems. “I need to do something to
protect the family and not have to worry about this day in and day out.”
“First
it was a shooting once a year, then once every six months, then once a month,
and now it’s every day,” he says. “We don’t even bat an eye as a country now. I
would like to move somewhere where that isn’t true and my kids don’t have to be
afraid.”
He
is surprised to feel as he does, both because he knows that statistically the
dangers to any one individual or family are quite small, and because he has
never been one for strong political opinions, and lives among relatives and
friends who are Trump supporters. In fact, he emphasizes, “I’m not trying to
choose sides. I am the type to sit back and support whoever is piloting the
ship because you want to support your president and not see him fail.”
He
has kept his feelings to himself, he says, particularly at work, where other
men wear handguns strapped to their ankles at the office and, according to his
wife, “joke about mass shootings being a force of natural selection.”
The
Lewins have rejected Australia because “they have huge spiders there,” Josh
says, and he is about as scared of spiders as he is of mass shootings. He has
set New Zealand as his goal, intrigued years ago by the popularity of the
extreme sport of “drift
triking” — riding nonmotorized Big Wheels-like contraptions down huge
hills. (New Zealand does have spiders, but venomous species capable of harming
humans are extremely rare.) More recently he has been attracted by the fact
that “after one mass shooting there they took steps to make it not so easy for
people to get ahold of weapons of war.” And then, “after the shootings this
weekend, I went from a 3 on the scale of how likely I was to actually move to a
6.”
Those
who say they are serious about leaving are quick to add that they recognize the
privilege that allows them to consider such a move at all.
“I
am acutely aware of how not everyone can do this,” says 40-year-old Janelle
Hanchett, a writer, who sold everything she owned in Northern California in
July and moved with her husband, Charles MacDonald, a union ironworker, and
their four school-age children to the Netherlands. “We are not rich, we have
crippling student loans, but we had equity in a house and the means to pick up
and leave.”
Tired
of what Hanchett describes as “the specter of this rising authoritarian regime,
and of feeling unsafe all the time,” they applied for a “freelance visa” that
the government of the Netherlands created to thank America for liberation
during World War II, and that allows Americans to live and work as freelancers.
(If they become employed by a Dutch company full time, their status switches to
a sponsored visa.)
“It
feels saner, more humane,” she says of her new home in the city of Haarlem, the
capital of the province of North Holland. “The people seem happier. And there
aren’t guns.”
Under
the program, they are entitled to all the country’s benefits, including
universal health care, a payment from the government of about 250 euros per
child per quarter, and admission to a “Newcomer” school that costs 3 euros per
month and helps children learn Dutch and transition to their new country.
When
they learned about the school, Hanchett says, “we started to cry from
happiness.” The principal told them, “Americans always react this way.”
In
addition to being aware of their privilege, these emigrants are also aware of
the many layers of irony.
Irony
in the fact that they have, they concede, come to sound somewhat like the
conspiracy theorists they accuse the “other side” of being — one group
stockpiling guns and building bunkers, afraid the government is coming for
their guns and immigrants are coming to take their jobs; the other keeping
go-bags by the door and hiding cash for airplane tickets for fear that the
government will start rounding up members of certain nationalities, religions
and races.
“Yes,
some of this is tinfoil-hat crazy, but some of it makes a lot of sense,” says
Jacobs of those on his left-leaning newsgroups, many of whom are former
national security bureaucrats, who are learning Krav Maga self-defense and
buying guns. “But the fact is we live under a government that has instituted
some terrifying policies.”
Another
irony is that many are looking to return to places their own ancestors fled —
and that at a time when one group’s badge of patriotism is to chant “Send her
back," they are essentially sending themselves back to the countries their
ancestors came from.
“We
have an escape route planned through Barcelona,” says Stephanie Schwab, a
digital marketer from Chicago who was born and raised in the U.S. but who has
an EU passport issued to descendants of German Holocaust victims. “The day that
we will be ready seems ever closer.” Well aware that Spain under longtime
dictator Francisco Franco was informally aligned with Germany, although
formally neutral, during World War II, she added: “Wouldn’t it be nutty if we
had to escape fascism and anti-Semitism by moving to Spain?”
Same
for Karen Allendoerfer, whose husband, a German citizen, has lived for more
than 20 years in the U.S., where they have raised two children. “That would be
ironic,” she said of her vague plan of eventually teaching English in her
husband’s native land. (She currently teaches biology at a STEM-focused private
school in Silicon Valley.) “Moving to Germany to get away from Nazis.”
Still,
the “old country” is the place most likely to welcome Americans nowadays,
making it a logical choice. Poland counts anyone with a Polish parent or
grandparent as a de facto citizen, which is why Eleanor Pelta, whose parents
fled Jewish persecution there, has a Polish passport in addition to her
American one, as do her children, who derive Polish citizenship automatically
through her.
Her
original “motivation was to allow my kids to work in the EU if they wanted to,”
says Pelta, who is an attorney with the American Immigration Lawyers
Association. “But these days I’m quite pleased to have dual nationality, and I
find it rather ironic that a child of Holocaust survivors would be viewing her
Polish passport as an escape route.”
Spain,
too, has been welcoming its formerly persecuted back home — particularly the
descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were forced on pain of death to convert
or emigrate during the Inquisition. Several years ago Spain established a path
to citizenship for foreign nationals who can prove Sephardic Jewish descent,
and while it is a high bar, requiring evidence of ancestry dating back more
than 500 years, thousands of Americans are attempting to clear it before the
application deadline on Oct. 1.
As
some look to leave, others, equally distressed with the current atmosphere,
argue for staying put and fighting back.
It
is that line of thinking that keeps Pam Fradkin, an administrative assistant at
a Boston-area university, from going anywhere. “Being queer is a danger to me
everywhere,” she says. “I’ll fight to maintain my humanity and my rights in the
country in which I was born. I will also fight to see and be the change I wish
for.”
Kami
Lewis Levin believe those who think the country is on the wrong track have a
responsibility to try to fix it — which is, in a roundabout way, why she is
packed for Costa Rica. Only by living elsewhere, she believes, can they have a
clear lens on what is happening back home. “My three kids have effectively
grown up in Park Slope [in Brooklyn, N.Y.], this wonderful magical bubble of a
place, and so they think that everyone is on the same page politically. We need
to get them out of here, to see a world that isn’t wealthy, where people take
care of each other, where they come to understand what their privilege is.”
Both
she and her husband will be teaching at the La Paz Community School in
Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where 30 percent of the 315 students are on scholarship
and which all their children, ages 4, 11 and 13, will attend. They aim to
return to the States in three years, when their eldest will be in his junior
year in high school, and when, she hopes, there will be a new resident in the
White House. If not, they might extend their stay.
“We
threatened to go both times [George W. Bush] was elected, we threatened to go
when Trump was elected, and based on what the polls are showing and he seems to
have an actual shot at being reelected, we’re happy to be going,” she says.
“We’re happy to not be here.”
Hanchett
also understands the criticism of those who opt to leave, and admits to some
guilt at “abandoning” her native land at a time she believes it to be in
trouble.
