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[-] braxy29@lemmy.world 205 points 1 year ago

please stop with the "Just Leave." we can't all just leave and i tire of hearing it. what limitations and obligations keep you where you are?

and if you genuinely can Just Leave wherever you are, reflect for awhile on your privilege, then try to recognize how many people do not have that option for any number of reasons.

sometimes i think this sentiment is only a little less tone-deaf than "just have a baby."

[-] 2fat4that@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago

If the reason you’re staying is family, then maybe you need to rethink your priorities. Never let blood keep you from doing what you want to do or being who you want to be. You can serve your family better when you succeed at reaching your goals.

[-] Snekeyes@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Translation. "I ate, world hunger solved".

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[-] Chickenstalker@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Leave, though. If enough people leave, only then will they realize how stupid they are. Your ancestors left the old countries on ships to the New World with only the clothes on their backs. Time for you Americans to emigrate elsewhere.

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 90 points 1 year ago

Fund their moves or shut the fuck up

[-] blusterydayve26@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago

I searched quickly, but I couldn’t find anything. If there was like a Patreon or something where I could give $50/mo to help people get the fuck out of shitty states or situations, I’d do it. Know any?

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[-] Cagi@lemmy.ca 66 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"It is impossible for me to leave"

"ThEn YoU ShOuLd LeAvE!"

Are you illiterate?

[-] CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

It’s never impossible, you could literally sell everything you own and go anywhere.

But most people won’t because that’s terrifying.

[-] finestnothing@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago

If it was easy enough for a significant amount of people to leave, the Republicans would love it because they could force out almost everyone that wouldn't vote for them

[-] Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 year ago

I have zero faith in republicans realizing any facts.

[-] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago

we're fairly well off but my wifes job is at a university, how do I move several campuses, the student body and the rest of the staff with us?

[-] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago

No, the Puritans were well-funded twats. Also, Texas isn't America, I suppose everyone refers to France as Europe?

What will happen is the few that can't afford to leave Texas will remain in an oppressive state run by psychopaths with no chance to free themselves. Those that can stay and fight, probably should, but it's also a huge ask to have people just trying to survive day-to-day also have to fight their shitty government back into the hell-hole from whence it came. They also have to deal with their own Texas neighbors who are too dumb to understand how repressed they are and actually like the direction that state is heading, as their own rights and freedoms are stripped away from underneath them.

It turns out that moving costs money, the cost of living varies greatly in surrounding states, Texas is huge, and with more than 60% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, the incidental expenses that pop up from a move would be too great for more than 60% of Americans. That's even if they could find a job on the receiving end.

[-] force@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You clearly don't know the challenges of leaving a country and moving to e.g. the EU or Australia or something, or any other country for that matter. Countries are extremely selective of who they want in, they likely won't accept someone unless they work in a specialization that the country is in a shortage of and is in demand. Most of the world has laws that you can't accept someone for work in a country unless you can prove that they can't find a citizen of the country to fill the position first, and afterwards they have to sponsor a work visa for you which is a lot of time, money, and paperwork for the company, so they often avoid it. It's also a lot of time, money, and paperwork for you.

You can also work as a digital nomad provided you have enough money saved up and can sustain yourself on self-employment (you're not allowed to work under an employer on these visas), but generally this requires moving between different countries a lot because this is not a path to permanent residency. Some countries have treaties with the US that have a similar, but more lenient, process, for example the DAFT for the Netherlands which basically allows self-employed entrepeneurs to reside in the Netherlands as long as you can sustain yourself the entire time without government aid, and have a spare ~€4500 in a Dutch bank account that you can't withdraw from at all times.

The other option is trying to get residence or citizenship by descent if you have a parent within 1-4 generations and meet certain criteria depending on what the citizenship laws of the country are – I'm in the process of trying to do this with an adoptive Slovak/Hungarian great-grandparent and adoptive German great-grandparent right now, and I can verify myself that this is also an extremely expensive and time-consuming process that I'm not sure if I can even afford to continue in the future, and the worst part is I don't even know if it will pay off because my situation is a little fuzzy and possibly doesn't count. If that doesn't work, I'm absolutely out of luck for moving out of the US; I've tracked down a majority of my biological ancestors in the past 3 centuries and none of them in the past 200 years are from outside of the US. My ancestry for basically until you get to around the 1500s or 1600s is entirely American, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German, Dutch, Belgian, and French, which I'm pretty sure qualifies me for the most white Anglo-Saxon American here.

There's one other viable choice too – attending university at another country. The problem is there are a lot of criteria you have to meet to be elligible for this in the first place (for one you have to be very young, they usually won't accept people who are past their 20s), often times American diplomas and 2-year degrees aren't seen as qualifying you for college outside of the US (in Germany they have the "Abitur" as a requirement for university instead of a diploma, which is somewhat more rigorous than an Associate's degree, and the only way they accept your high school education as enough is if you gained specific credits and pass a few AP tests while in high school, and they don't count doing those credits in college it HAS to be while you're in high school), it's highly competitive, universities are required to only accept foreigners after they've accepted all applicants who are citizens; and it can be incredibly expensive unless you're going to a country which has no tuition costs and cheap student housing, which less and less countries are doing (Norway recently closed off free tuition for new non-European applicants).

The last options available aren't viable for a majority of people, but I'll list them out anyway. For one, you can spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on property in some countries in exchange for a residence visa, a la Spain, Portugal, Cyprus' Golden Visa programs.

Otherwise, if you can't afford that (most people trying to escape the US or poorer countries can't), you can go through literal hell and join the French Foreign Legion at a chance to ask for citizenship of France after a few years – but this is a TERRIBLE decision for anyone to make, the FFL isn't just a group of soldiers, their entire training is basically abusing you with the worst conditions they can in order to weed out those who aren't extremely tough, and the soldiers are put in the most intense, mind-and-body breaking deployments imaginable. It is scary and most people aren't built for it psychologically nor physically. Plus you're not even guaranteed citizenship, even after serving the 3-year period a lot of people are denied it.

TL;DR, the ability to move out of a country/free-travel-area is relatively exclusive and inaccessible to most people, and only gets less realistic as time goes on due to both age and growing anti-immigrant sentiment in many countries. If you're part of a group subject to a country's systematic social & economic issues (i.e. not already in a privileged/well-off position where you can already afford to fund your education or have got the education to work in a highly wanted specialization), it's practically impossible to migrate to one of the countries that you'll have more opportunities in, even if you are part of the potential third of Americans who might qualify for citizenship by descent. It's the reason so many people risk their lives and freedom to illegally cross the border into the US and Europe every year, in a place where the system is against you it's unlikely most people have access to the means to legally move away.

[-] EssentialCoffee@midwest.social 12 points 1 year ago

Well, hopefully you can get enough people to get over the hurdles you have to vote for actual change.

[-] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Have you seen the state of gerrymandering in Texas? They know their positions are unpopular abominations against democracy, so they’ve worked furtively to dismantle democracy so they can get away with this shit.

Yes, for the love of humanity, VOTE. But never believe that’s all you can or must do. We outnumber them, and they need to be reminded of that in more ways than one.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Gerrymandering doesn't explain why we reelected Greg "It could've been worse" Abbott.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

In Texas, "leaving" can be a 10-hour drive and we still border with plenty of states that highly restrict abortion.

[-] red@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The people who are saying leave, are the ones seeing you as the frog slowly boiling, but not realizing it until it's too late.

Of course it sucks. Of course you might have to build life anew, but a real life beats a kettle that's heating up.

All I'm saying it's not black and white, and many probably already left or are in the process.

[-] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Okay, and? That doesn't change a thing braxy said. What if you've been aware for years of the pot getting hotter and hotter and have had every desire to leave but don't have the ability to? Those that have left were in a position in which they had the means to do so. Those that want to but can't for any number of reasons (finances, family, health, etc. etc.) don't have much choice.

[-] red@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

My take is that there's nothing wrong in saying leave, or people leaving. But I also agreed that it's not possible for everyone, or not all want to - until perhaps something is too late.

I don't understand why the people who can't/won't/don't want to take offense from it, when it's a viable option for many.

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[-] TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Some of us also want to cool down the pot instead. I'd rather swim in my pot than someone else's.

[-] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

What about the child rape victims who have zero agency? What about the disabled who are completely reliant on others? What about people who have court orders barring them from leaving for whatever reason? What about those for whom leaving would mean abandoning their children to an abusive spouse who has custody?

I could name reasons that’s not feasible for many, many people, but the bottom line is that may work for privileged people, but our responsibility is to care for all of us, and saying ‘sucks to be you’ is not a solution any of us should accept.

this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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