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.
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.
Which are also usually people who voted for Harris.
I think there was once a time I could have been in favor of this as at least an opt-in as it would benefit everyone to work collectively. Before Trump won a second time.
But now I’m seeing that the average US person is either aggressively anti-intellectual or petulantly virtue ethicist. And I don’t want anything to do with most of them. If they’re drowning, they’d drag me down with them if I tried to pull them out of the water.
Right now, realistically if I moved out I’d be pretty poor, so I’m just banking on the democrats winning in 2028 as they are very likely going to, then before shit starts collapsing anyway hopefully that will provide a few years to save up and move. I’m not waiting for another republican presidency to potentially happen after this. I know I might be fucked anyway but that’s the best plan I can execute.
Every option is a risk. Some are better odds with better payouts.
Nope. The GOP has a 6-pt edge over Dems among people with degrees.
If you’re living in LA California and you turn to your neighbors, which went 64/31 for Harris, and say “Fuck you, you’re all on your own” when ICE rolled into town… Idk, buddy. Maybe Harris didn’t deserve to win, if these are the kinds of people who claimed to support her policies.