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Films that made people emigrate

theguardian.com

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Re: Films that made people emigrate

#31

Post by jltsiren »

returningfory2 wrote: post #30
jltsiren wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why Americans keep insisting that travel is expensive. Of course it can be expensive if you choose to make it expensive, but it doesn't have to be. When I was a kid in Finland in the 80s and 90s, families often took vacations in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands. It was affordable enough even to many lower middle class families. Those were not particularly close destinations. The distance…

Are Finnish families flying to the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands for culture or for a beach vacation? I'm guessing the latter. And to replicate this, Americans don't need to leave the US - they can fly to south Florida any time of year, and a bunch of other places like California during the summer. Americans travel a bunch, and I'm not convinced they travel shorter distances than Europeans. It's just because t…

Everyone has their own reasons, but most people are pretty curious. If you go to a faraway place and have the free time, you are probably going to spend at least a few days exploring what's out there.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#32

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

widenrun wrote: post #27
michaelteter wrote: post #2

Those who can should try living in different parts of the world. It really broadens your appreciation for life and other cultures. Of course, how you feel during and after the period depends greatly on where you are and whom you meet along the way. I'm always amazed at how many people from my home country (US) I talk to who say, "oh I can't afford to go there". For less than $1500, usually, you can go to the opposite…

It's not perfect, but as an immigrant, I can usually split locals into two groups as soon as I meet them: Those who spent time overseas and those who never left. The conversations are so distinct!

"Oh look at my country's patriots / hunting down below / what do they know of England / who only England know?"

(a misquotation of Rudyard Kipling that I've carried in my head for 30 years)

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#33

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #16
refactor_master wrote: post #5

The thing I’m always missing from these pieces is how . How do the rest of us emigrate, without being anglophone and teaching English, or a “digital content creator”? Or for example, “Scott” moving to Japan with his Chinese wife. How do the visas even wok out? Moving to the (rich part of) EU from the non-Western world is certainly not easy. I don’t know if I should read these pieces as “I can transfer freely with ful…

It's a UK newspaper, you're not the target audience.

It's an anglophone newspaper with major operations in the UK and the USA, and significant operations in Australia.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#34

Post by lmm »

devilbunny wrote: post #25
lmm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not flying is one thing, but so many US-Americans are scared of going into an actually different culture - somewhere where they speak a different language and watch different TV. A lot of people - not everyone, but a lot - could easily reach somewhere like that on that 8 hour road trip, but they won't, and they'll all try and talk about how it's "oh there's so much variety in the US I don't need to" which is just suc…

> which is just such a transparent lie Let's give it a generous read, though. Your life will be more interesting, in all likelihood, if you travel a lot (I can see a few narrow exceptions, but not the point). However. If you don't leave the US, you are limited to one absolutely huge country that has pretty much every kind of subtropical to alpine climate, landscape, etc., that you can imagine. You don't need a passpo…

> You don't need a passport to pick up and go whenever you like, and - and this really mattered in the immediate post-COVID world - they can't keep you from coming back home.

If you're a US citizen you can't be denied entry to the US; if you were going to another continent thne theoretically you could worry about a scenario where they ground all flights (even though they didn't do that at the height of Covid), but even post-Covid it's pretty implausible that they'd fully close the border with Canada or Mexico (and I believe you don't even need a passport?).

> I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed. I'd feel like I had wasted a lot of money if I just went there and winged it...So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary,

This mentality is just utterly bizarre to me.

> She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy. There's no way she would have done the kind of trips I did when young, where I landed with no cell phone, no hotel reservations, and no particular plan, all alone.

You're talking like this is some innate property rather than lack of effort and practice.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#35

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Although I probably had not watched it for more than a decade before I actually emigrated from the UK to the USA in 1989, I have never been able to shake the feeling that the original TV show "Starsky & Hutch" played an outsize [0] role in my conception of America and my reasons to want to be here.

[0] not sole or even primary, just outsize.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#36

Post by jltsiren »

refactor_master wrote: post #5

The thing I’m always missing from these pieces is how . How do the rest of us emigrate, without being anglophone and teaching English, or a “digital content creator”? Or for example, “Scott” moving to Japan with his Chinese wife. How do the visas even wok out? Moving to the (rich part of) EU from the non-Western world is certainly not easy. I don’t know if I should read these pieces as “I can transfer freely with ful…

The basic idea is that you should be useful. If you can plausibly claim that you will contribute to the economy without causing too much trouble, most countries will welcome you as an immigrant. The specifics vary from country to country and from situation to situation.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#37

Post by codersfocus »

hilux wrote: post #14
refactor_master wrote: post #5

The thing I’m always missing from these pieces is how . How do the rest of us emigrate, without being anglophone and teaching English, or a “digital content creator”? Or for example, “Scott” moving to Japan with his Chinese wife. How do the visas even wok out? Moving to the (rich part of) EU from the non-Western world is certainly not easy. I don’t know if I should read these pieces as “I can transfer freely with ful…

As with most travel and retirement articles in a US/UK newspaper, the target audience for this piece is white people with a US/UK or other rich-country passport. Which is fine. Just recognize these articles for what they are - part of the entertaining filler that makes up most of the paper - and not some hard-hitting analytical piece on emerging global migration patterns!

If you haven’t looked at the news about the crises in US and EU, there are many non white people with non rich country passports migrating as well.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#38

Post by ggreer »

houseatrielah wrote: post #23
lmm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not flying is one thing, but so many US-Americans are scared of going into an actually different culture - somewhere where they speak a different language and watch different TV. A lot of people - not everyone, but a lot - could easily reach somewhere like that on that 8 hour road trip, but they won't, and they'll all try and talk about how it's "oh there's so much variety in the US I don't need to" which is just suc…

American workers barely get any vacation and they probably don't want to burn what little they have on flight time. Mexico is a very popular and that's a different culture and language.

The concept of Americans being overworked and underpaid is simply incorrect. US PPP-adjusted median disposable income is $46,600/year. Only Luxembourg has higher amounts of disposable income. The average American works 1,765 hours per year, the same as New Zealand.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#39

Post by 082349872349872 »

devilbunny wrote: post #25
lmm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not flying is one thing, but so many US-Americans are scared of going into an actually different culture - somewhere where they speak a different language and watch different TV. A lot of people - not everyone, but a lot - could easily reach somewhere like that on that 8 hour road trip, but they won't, and they'll all try and talk about how it's "oh there's so much variety in the US I don't need to" which is just suc…

> which is just such a transparent lie Let's give it a generous read, though. Your life will be more interesting, in all likelihood, if you travel a lot (I can see a few narrow exceptions, but not the point). However. If you don't leave the US, you are limited to one absolutely huge country that has pretty much every kind of subtropical to alpine climate, landscape, etc., that you can imagine. You don't need a passpo…

> but a lot of little details that might not be apparent at first glance

That's the basic difference between domestic and foreign travel, isn't it?

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#40

Post by adastra22 »

schoen wrote: post #28
adastra22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But visa-free travel is not the same as visa-free emigration. Very, very few countries let people from other countries just buy a house or setup shop (pretty much just the Schengen zone).

Were there actually legal restrictions on those things in many places prior to the routinization of passports and passport controls in World War I?

No. You just got on a boat and went to some other country. No passports, no passport controls, no immigration quotas.

In the US at least it goes back a little bit further than WW1, to the Chinese exclusion act in the late 1800’s.

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