As Americans continue mentally and emotionally processing what it will mean for Donald Trump to return to the Oval Office, there is an understandably large number of people who are wondering whether this is finally the time to grab their “go bags” and make a run for the border.
Last week, I published “The Daunting Realities of Trying to Leave the Country” here on Verdict, explaining some of the most formidable barriers facing those who would like to become expatriates. I also noted some ominous political trends in other countries that might make those possible destinations no better places to live than the United States.
There is clearly more to be said about these issues, so today’s column will pick up where I left off last week, expanding on some of my points there and explaining several additional important systemic and situation-specific reasons why very, very few people will ultimately be able to bug out.
Of course, even though last week’s election results were shocking, many of the people currently talking about exiting the country will end up taking a deep breath and abandoning the idea of leaving. The question is whether large numbers of those who nonetheless would like to depart will be able to successfully emigrate. That issue can best be understood by considering more generally why large-scale movements of people across borders are necessarily so very rare.
As I noted in last week’s column, I am in a unique position to write about these issues, because I did in fact leave the U.S. more than a year ago on what could very well be a permanent basis. I have engaged in quite a bit of research on my own, and I have also hired immigration lawyers in the U.S. and three other countries as I have considered my own future path.
I have shared some of what I have done and learned in that process, and I will reveal more tidbits as appropriate to tell the story that I want to tell in this and future columns. Even so, I am not an immigration lawyer. In my writing on Verdict and elsewhere, it is not typically necessary to include the “This is not legal advice” disclaimer, but I hereby emphatically offer it here: This is not legal advice. Although my bottom line is that expatriation will not be a realistic option for any but a very small number of people, some amount of cross-border migration does happen all the time and might be both possible and wise for some worried Americans. Nothing I write here is meant to dissuade anyone from exploring available options for themselves.
Because most of the readers of this column will not end up leaving their countries, this column provides an analysis of migration from a policy and logistical/legal perspective. It turns out that the realities of migration will inevitably keep most people in their current locations, which means that almost everyone who is horrified by the U.S. election results will be dealing with the new reality without having left the country.
How should people think about what that reality might become? More importantly, what are the possibilities for a better future, sooner or later, and how might people take action now to bend the arc of history back in a more hopeful direction? Later this week, I will publish a third entry in this series, offering a few preliminary thoughts along those lines. Although my “brand” as a commentator is decidedly pessimistic—based, I insist, not on a negative worldview but on clear-eyed realism—even I can see how things might get back on track at some point.
For now, however, I will return to the reasons why the very, very large majority of human beings will not be able to leave their countries, even if they want to do so.
Sheer Numbers of People and the Limitations in Host Countries
As I explained in a pair of Verdict columns almost three years ago, Canada is the country that Americans quite reasonably tend to view as the most obvious destination for relocating. In my column last week, I was thus sorry to have to report the almost exquisitely unfortunate coincidence that Canada only weeks ago set out a figurative sign for would-be immigrants reading: “Temporarily closed. Try us again in 3 years (maybe).” Seriously, the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced late last month that the country needed a “pause” to deal with the internal crises caused by an unexpected surge of migrants into Canada in the past several years, when the number of new arrivals surprised everyone by being more than triple the already rather generous target.
I should be careful to reemphasize that there need be nothing “anti-immigrant” about such a policy change. It is instructive, however, that even the most immigration-friendly wealthy country in the world is seeing a rise of genuinely ugly bigotry. Just recently, for example, I heard a middle-aged White Canadian man—who was at the next table in my local pub and speaking loudly on his phone, making it impossible not to overhear the conversation—angrily repeating lies about how immigrants here are overwhelmingly responsible for violent crime. This man also (again, I was not trying to eavesdrop) talked about his job on Toronto’s version of Wall Street, so this person is not a “left-behind Blue Collar victim of globalization” or any of the other cliches that too many people use to excuse bigotry.
And his is hardly an isolated opinion. The sad reality is that the most likely outcome of next year’s national elections in Canada will be the rise of the party that very closely tracks many Trumpist positions (and not only on immigration). Over the next few months, I will surely write one or more columns about all of that, but the point here is that even a relatively recent upsurge in immigration has significantly altered the national social and political landscape. And with the country’s unemployment rate also rising, there is even more pressure to keep newcomers out.
Again, the Trudeau government itself is saying sensible, non-bigoted things—the unexpectedly large number of entrants has created the equivalent of huge traffic jams in housing, health care, and education, all coinciding with higher unemployment rates—and can thus justify doing what it is doing for purely logistical reasons. Other politicians, however, are already creating a pile-up to justify a turn toward xenophobia.
Why is it so easy to forget those logistical barriers to large-scale immigration? Those of us who are lucky enough to have been able to visit foreign countries over the years do so for relatively short periods of time, as part of a flow of visitors that can be accommodated by the existing stock of hotel rooms, youth hostels, and so on. We generally do not need health care during our visits, and we do not enroll our children in foreign schools.
When we are then tempted to think, “Gee, this is kinda nice! Maybe I could live here,” the unconscious assumption is that the destination country has a normal ebb and flow of migration, such that the arrival of a few more people in the usual run of things will not affect the host country in a way that could cause a public policy problem—or even that it could cause anyone to notice a difference in the country’s normal daily life.
That, however, is exactly not what we are talking about here. As I noted above, it took only a two-year unexpected surge in in-migration to Canada to all but break the system, and the crisis was caused by too many arrivals not in an absolute sense but purely in a timing sense. Canada planned for—because it affirmatively wanted—the extra million or so new immigrants (and more). It simply did not expect them all to show up so soon, and the country was thus not able to absorb them in the usual ways.
By pure coincidence, I woke up this morning to find this email from New Zealand Immigration: “Your New Zealand Electronic Travel Authority (NZeTA) is expiring within 2 months. If you wish to travel to New Zealand, you will need to submit a new NZeTA request OR apply for an appropriate Visa.” What was that about? Early last year, I was a visiting scholar for several weeks in New Zealand, which required me to apply for a particular kind of Visa that I could have used to return for further temporary visits over a two-year period.
New Zealand is a lovely place, and many people might think about moving there. The distances from the U.S. are extreme, but it is still a stable country where there are no language barriers for most Americans. But if someone wanted to move there, the “appropriate Visa” mentioned in that email would be a very different matter indeed from my temporary one. New Zealand is a country of only 5.2 million people—much smaller than Canada’s 40 million or more—so the Kiwi government would of course be quite worried even if “only” tens of thousands of Americans were to arrive seeking new homes and lives.
The bottom line is that no country would ever maintain a large enough stock of empty homes and public infrastructure to deal with more than a minor blip in net in-migration. Yes, every individual potential entrant could check online real estate information and see that there seem always to be houses for sale, but all of that changes when the numbers go up even a little bit.
Consider what happens with domestic dislocations in the U.S. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, half of the population of New Orleans left the city, most of whom have never returned. Because they were moving within the United States, they were not legally barred from entering Texas or any other state, but those hundreds of thousands of people put a serious strain on housing and public resources in Houston and elsewhere.
The U.S. will see similar dislocations with increasing frequency when weather extremes start to force people to leave Florida and other vulnerable areas. American should expect that domestic politics will become tense—at best—when large numbers of newcomers show up, even legally. Just ask the people of Springfield, Ohio.
But What About A “Special Situation,” Like a Trump-Fueled Political Crisis?
As I noted at the beginning of this column, there will continue to be people who leave the U.S. and find homes elsewhere. And as I have just explained, the problem is that if more than a very small fraction of the people who are currently scared (quite understandably) by the election results try to get out of the country, the rest of the world could not accommodate them without facing serious shortages, dislocations, and ultimately (but rather quickly) political backlash.
Surely, however, we might think that host countries would make an exception in response to a true crisis. Right? Up to a point, yes, but that point is much nearer than we might think. The current rise in racist nationalism across Europe was perhaps the inevitable result of a massive increase in refugee migration in the last decade, especially from the Middle East. At first, the wealthy countries of northern Europe responded with open arms. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was especially bold in her leadership in bringing in unprecedented numbers of refugees.
And to be clear, these were true refugees, fleeing nearly certain death had they stayed in their war-torn countries. Even so, the locals’ generosity did not last, and the closest present-day analog to Germany’s Nazi party is now polling terrifyingly well as that country’s coalition government has recently fallen apart.
For the U.S. to suddenly experience a cataclysm that pushes millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of people out of the country would put even larger pressures on potential destination countries. But if it is a cataclysm, would Canadians and people in similar countries (large numbers of whom are similarly opposed to Trump and Trumpism) not step up and bring in more Americans?
Looking at Canada specifically, I often find it interesting to think about “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the novel by Ontario’s own Margaret Atwood that was turned into a fascinating TV series that first aired in 2017 and is set to run its final season beginning next year. I wrote two columns here on Verdict in 2022 in which I argued that the Tale was a “pre-documentary,” because so much of what Atwood depicted in the fictional Gilead seemed all too possible in the unfortunate real-life version of the United States.
One aspect of Atwood’s story, however, never quite added up. The TV series depicted Canadian cities having set up centers where American refugees would gather and look for news about loved ones who might also have escaped Gilead’s horrific dystopia. Canadians are shown as supportive and heroic in helping their American cousins.
I have only spent a bit more than a year up here, which means that I should be careful about making statements about “Canadian culture” or similar broad-brush reactions. Tentatively, however, I can say that Canadians seem not to embrace the kind of bravado-driven patriotism that is common in the U.S. People here certainly love and are proud of their country, but it seems to me to be a quiet kind of patriotism that is if anything understated.
Atwood’s depiction of her country thus strikes me as a perfect example of Canadian patriotism in the best sense. She clearly wants to imagine that her fellow citizens would respond with kind hearts and open arms to a crisis that displaced millions of people in her fictional world. And up to a point, she is surely right.
As I wrote above, however, that point is nowhere near as far away as anyone might wish to imagine. Even in her world, there would surely be antagonistic responses after a relatively short period of time. Having a friend sleep on one’s couch for a night or two is fun; for a couple of weeks is annoying; and for more than a month is a different matter entirely. Again, even though Europe’s recent immigration crisis involved true refugees—and Atwood’s tale is similarly centered around what is unquestionably a humanitarian catastrophe—there is a limit to humans’ ability to sympathize and sacrifice, especially for strangers.
And to be clear, the people who want to leave the U.S. because of last week’s election are not refugees, at least not yet. It is undeniable that many such people will be disfavored in the new order, from LGBTQ+ people to racial minorities to political enemies to intellectuals. Many of them have genuine reasons to feel that they will soon be in danger. But if hundreds of thousands of such people were to show up in any given country, the locals would be almost certain to say in short order, “It’s not like you left a war zone.” I make that prediction not in a judgmental sense but simply because discomfort and dislocation wear on people very quickly, and the result is almost always to blame the new arrivals, no matter their reasons for immigrating.
In the end, it could not possibly make sense for countries to be at the ready to take in surges of even the most sympathetic entrants at a moment’s notice. That puts limits—not absolute limits, but stringent limits nonetheless—on the range of possible international migration. There is, at best, some ability to stretch current limits at the margin, but not by much and not for very long. Some number of Americans will leave their country and never come back, but most everyone will have to end up staying.
In Part Three of this series, I will offer some thoughts that I hope might be helpful to those who do end up staying, even though there is no sugarcoating the current situation. Many countries have gone through truly bleak periods, and the U.S. is now set to join that tragic list. But it will be useful to think about how the tide might turn. More to come.
