Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
I would prefer Americans stay in their shitty country and fix it themselves.
Yeah just like those other refugees fleeing repressive regimes across Eastern Europe and the southern hemisphere! Go back and fix the problems yourselves with your zero money or political power and total surveillance states.
/s in case it’s not blindingly obvious.
No, no — you misspelled ‘America bad’.
Now, repeat after me: America bad. See, it’s not that hard!
How? Honestly, this country is so rigged from every direction I struggle to see a path to a more perfect union. I’m not fond of violence, but we clearly can’t sit about and do nothing, so what tactics will be effective? Protests are somewhere between useless and martyrdom suicide. Voting in general elections is countered by gerrymandering. Voting in primaries is countered by mass propaganda and underfunded education. I can’t even get my local reps to tax political donations and political advertising.
I can list dozens of policies that’d improve the county, state, and country but I don’t know how to get them implemented when half my countrymen favor authoritarianism of one flavor or another.
[===/o|]
To be fair, the ones with the desire and means to leave probably don’t have much overlap with the morons causing the problems
The one’s leaving are generally mostly the group of people who have been trying to fix it.
I don’t think they owe anyone shit.
The ones leaving tend to be the professional class with the excess income and transferable job skills, typically with family abroad who can take them in once they depart.
The ones left behind tend to be the young and unemployed, the pensioners, and the minority-majority working class who can’t afford the bureaucratic cost of updating their citizenship.
Flies in the face of Contractualism as a theory of civilization. I hope you’re not a big fan of Rawls, Locke, Proudhorn, or Kant.
At some point, we each have a moral debt to one another that is within our capacity to fulfill. I might argue that people who feel the urge to expatriate are driven by their belief that they can no longer productively benefit their communities.
Are we telling someone “you have an obligation to feed your children”? Sure. Reasonable. But what if they’ve been banned from entering the grocery store?
I don’t think anyone is obligated to martyr themselves in the face of a murderous paramilitary. Certainly not when both major parties appear happy to extend this American Gestapo a blank check for materials and manpower. But, at some point, we gotta fight them over here if we don’t want to fight them over there.
Fascism doesn’t end at America’s borders, as anyone in Cuba or Venezuela or Iran or Gaza can tell you.
As an American, so do I. Unfortunately, a lot of people are deciding it’s not worth it. The good thing is, the more skilled labor that leaves the US, the less GDP the US will have in the long run. In other words, skilled labor leaving is a good way to speedrun the collapse of a shitty empire.
Anyone who has been following the liberals’ hostile attitude towards the Russian exodus is laughing up their sleeves at this.
But also, the whole theory that you’re a prisoner of your national origin and should… idk… Rambo your way to freedom, because the “Half a Genocide” party lost a few swing states to the “Full Genocide” party? Feels like we’re echoing the same fascist talking points of the MAGA crowd.
Might as well tell a bunch of Jews to stick around Germany and fix the Holocaust.
Do you say the same about Ukrainians? Iranians? Palestinians? Turks?
That’s what I thought too. We don’t need Americans to make our country shitty. We have enough troubles with our own far right parties. Keep those people away from us and try to get your shit together.
Yeah! It’s always the refugees’ fault for the problems they’re fleeing. Grab yer fuckin bootstraps, my dudes.
/s obvs