There are no easy answers.
One can hop over into Canada for instance and legally stay there for 6 months without needing a visa (although if you donāt have telework to do, thatās a problem, as youād need a visa to actually work). You can exit the country at that point and come right back again for another 6 month stint, as I understand it.
My daughter knows [of] people who country-hop like this ā digital nomads have done it for years but also people waiting for more permanent arrangements in a particular country.
Thatās of course not practical for many. My daughter is a 100% telecommute but a big time zone difference would likely be problematic and she has 5 kids (4 still at home, one at university in the US and should finish up his degree in the coming year). She also has a husband with disabilities. It is hard, and expensive, to keep uprooting everyone.
She is currently thinking in terms of deciding what her personal āred linesā are and if those are crossed, off to Canada to see what develops and look into more permanent options. Sort of a āvacationā they may or may not return from. She frets about conscription for her oldest, indoctrination for the younger, losing various special ed options they need, etc.
Sheās looking at Portugal because it has relatively liberal visa options. Sheās very pragmatic and figures language would only be a speed bump to the young kids.
But as I pointed out, she also lacks a crystal ball. They might go through all the upheaval to become Portuguese only to find that 10 years hence America is rebuilding and Europe is in ruins, for all we know. Who knows where the wars and climate disasters will fall the hardest and fastest ā¦ or what democracies elsewhere will fall?
Itās easier for me to rationalize like that exactly because I DONāT have children (apart from my 32 y.o. disabled stepson) so the devil I know, bad as it is, seems not so bad as the ones I donāt know.
When Shitler was elected last November we went through a brief spasm of seriously looking into moving up around Ottawa ourselves ā¦ itās an easy drive from where we are. But even though health care is mostly better in Canada, we might have a hard and disruptive time reproducing the supports weāve spent years building for our son here in the States. And now the US may well outright ASSAULT Canada, and even if it doesnāt, the tariff war wonāt be easy on them, any more than it will be on us.
Finally the general āugly Americanā resentment is rapidly mutating into a āfuck America and Americansā sentiment ā¦ the US may be single-handedly responsible for the collapse or severe impairment of civil society worldwide and people will want a throat to choke. IDK that Iād want to be a true refugee in some strange land where everyone thinks or suspects Iām MAGA or something. Kind of like how some Europeans are said to think that entertainments like old Cowboy movies or Baywatch or Untouchables episodes represent any true aspect of life in the US (years ago, an acquaintance of mine had someone in Spain ask him where he lived and when he said Chicago, they wondered if that wasnāt a dangerous place ā¦ they had visions of gangsters and machine guns).
Anyway sure if we become malnourished and the power is off more than on we might grab our passports (we renewed them all back in November while the State Department was still functioning) and try to get out. But that would be a Hail Mary pass that could easily take us āout of the frying pan and into the fireā. Other than that, we are staying put. My daughter has her own calculus and contingency plans, as we all must.
