The expatriation guide for Americans: is moving abroad a viable survival strategy?

With any presidential election, there are plenty of throwaway comments about "moving to Canada." With Trump's second term shaping up to be an authoritarian nightmare, these comments are taking on a more serious tone.

I'm writing this post as someone who did move overseas, sort of. I never really fully left my US presence—I've maintained a home here, my wife lives here with my cat and dog, and I never had to go through the efforts of packing up all my stuff, shipping it across the ocean, and finding a new home to settle in permanently. But I did have to go through enough effort to establish working authority and get permanent residence. I moved mostly for my safety—not from the government, but from neo-Nazis who kept trying to kill me. I also wanted a new adventure and a new job, and I was lucky enough to have a connection to help me out with that (more on that later). So I have a little bit of perspective on what it takes to leave the US. But, as I write this, I am actively trying to move back. So I also share this from the point of view of someone who has seen the grass on both sides of the fence and determined it's a lovely shade of sun-burnt brown.

I'm not going to say one way or the other whether expatriation is or isn't right for you. I don't know you, and your situation will be different than mine. What I will do in this guide is explain a little bit about what some of the paths are that you can take and what you will need to do to prepare. One important note: in almost every case, the preparations you need to make include every step you need to take to move domestically inside the United States and then some.

Anyhow, let's look at your options.

Schengen Shuffle

If you don't want to reestablish a permanent presence overseas but don't want to be physically in the United States, then the most paperwork-free path is probably the "Schengen Shuffle." The Schengen Zone is a group of 29 countries that have abolished internal border controls between each other, instead pushing border enforcement out to the edges of the zone. There are some nuances: the Schengen Zone and the EU have a lot of overlap but they are not subsets of one another,^[1] and whether or not there are border controls can depend on the mode of entry.^[2]

US travelers with a valid American passport can enter the Schengen area and remain for 90 days visa free once per 180 days. This means that you can spend (almost) half the year inside the Schengen area, but every 90 days you'll have to leave the area until those 180 days are up. There are a few options for doing this: you can enter the UK with an American passport and stay for up to six months. Americans can enter Turkey visa-free for 90 days or Albania for up to a year. You can keep this up indefinitely if you'd like (or at least until the rules change), but it's not without a catch.

In most cases (it varies country to country), visa-free arrivals are for tourist and business purposes. Business is different than work: business purposes are things like attending a meeting with a client or going to a conference. Work means seeking employment with a local company. In most cases, these visas do not entitle you to work. Moreover, remote work often does count as work, especially if you're doing "productive work" like writing software, designing logos, or building websites. From a legal point of view, working remotely from other countries can expose you to export control risks, tax risks, and so forth.

Doing the Schengen Shuffle also doesn't entitle you to either healthcare or housing. You have no recourse to public funds—no unemployment insurance, no disability coverage. You can't open a bank account or sign a lease. In many countries, you can't sign up for a cell phone plan. It's a very impermanent way to live. It's also very expensive: short term housing is usually very expensive (though you can find affordable options if you're willing to do your cooldowns in places like Turkey or Albania), and it's hard to live forever out of a suitcase. Getting prescriptions is hard but not impossible. Don't throw away your pill bottles and always travel with drugs in their original packaging. Even if you can refill prescriptions, it's very unlikely anyone will prescribe a non-resident a 90-day supply. However, in some countries, like Turkey, more meds are available over-the-counter. Depending on your prescription, you may be able to restock there.

Most people doing the Schengen Shuffle are either retirees or digital nomads with few expenses or ties, or people who have some money and a lust for adventure. It's rarley a viable option for people who need to work and make a living. But if you do have the ability and money to make it work, here's what you might want to prepare:

Renew your passport

Most countries require your passport to be valid for the entirety of the potential duration of your stay, meaning it needs to be valid for up to a year in the future depending on the country.

Really plan an itinerary

The 90 day stay in Schengen is strictly enforced. Overstaying your allowance will have serious consequences that may even result in you being banned from the Area for up to five years. You might get a stamp in your passport that says "Overstay" and this can cause other countries to deny your entry, even if they're not Schengen countries. Do not risk overstaying your visa. Plan a few extra days in the event of flight delays.

Know exactly what the requirements are of the places you're going to travel. Book flights and hotels well in advance—usually I'll recommend people book the travel to their next leg on the shuffle before they start their current one. Keep up to date with the airlines—they can and do change flight schedules and this can affect your timing.

In some cases, airlines will not let you board unless you can provide proof of an exit flight.

Get a credit card with travel insurance

Since you probably won't have health insurance during the shuffle, you'll need some other way to cover medical care in the event of an emergency. I've had friends who have needed hospital stays while overseas and travel insurance is often better than domestic health insurance in this regard.

Get an immigration attorney

If you do mess up, you're going to want an expert you can call. You can usually schedule a relatively low-cost paid consultation with an immigration attorney who can give you advice on what to do and what not to do to safely ensure you can shuffle smoothly through borders.

Pack light

You're going to be moving a lot. You're going to want to become best friends with the same outfits.

Consider extending

If the lack of permanence starts to get old, then consider extending your Schengen stay. You can do this by applying for a visa while in the country—in fact, for Americans looking to move to the Schengen area, it's usually recommended to first arrive with a fresh, 90-day Schengen stay and then schedule an appointment to apply once you are in-country. Beware, however: many of these appointments need to be scheduled more than 3 months in advance.

The visa route

The "normal" way to move overseas is to apply for and obtain a visa. There are too many visas in too many countries to start listing them all off and it depends on your situation, your passport, and your current immigration status. However, in expat forums some of the usual suspects come up from time to time.

Family reunification

If you happen to be married to a Canadian/European Union/other country citizen, it's usually the case that your spouse can sponsor you/your family in their country. This typically has a nominal fee associated with it, and you'll usually need to provide official documentation. You'll need to get an apostille^[3] of your marriage certificate and, depending on the country, you may need to get it translated.

You'll also need copies/apostilles of birth certificates, diplomas, university transcripts, and professional certifications, among other things, if you intend to relocate and work.

In cases where your spouse is not a citizen in the country, then family reunification is possible with an immigrant visa. However, there may be language learning certification requirements associated with it—for instance, as a German permanent resident, your spouse has a legal entitlement to a German permanent residency, as well. However, they will have to demonstrate at least A1-level^[4] competency in German to receive the document. For some visas such as the European Blue Card, the applicant is entitled to visas for their family, as well. This certification must be from an accredited institution—your online certificate won't work.

With a family reunification visa, depending on the country, you may also need to provide proof of finances, which means obtaining bank statements for the last 3 to 6 months. Most of the time the host nation is looking for proof of liquid wealth: real estate holdings and retirement savings do not count.

You may also need to provide proof that you're not married elsewhere. This is nearly impossible—you can't prove a negative. However, your town clerk should be able to provide a "Letter of No Record." If you've been divorced in the past, you may also need to provide copies and originals of the divorce decree.

Lastly, in some countries you may need to provide a "certificate of good conduct," essentially a letter from the police indicating that you are not a criminal on the run, subject to probation or other restrictions, or have a serious criminal record.

Student visa

If you want to study abroad, then a student visa is the way to go. For a student visa, you'll usually need a letter of acceptance from a local university, proof of funds, transcripts, and proof of a return flight.

It varies from country to country, but student visas can allow you some limited rights to work, though typically not full-time (a common exception is university-related work).

European Blue Card

The Blue Card program is an EU initiative to attract high-skill workers to the European Union. In principle, all EU member nations can implement this program, but in practice, the vast majority of Blue Cards are issued by Germany.^[5]

The Blue Card is a fast-track visa program that allows recipients to relocate with their families and work in the host country. It does not entitle someone to work in other EU nations and there are some restrictions on applicability: you cannot change jobs without permission during the first two years of applicablity, you must not be unemployed for more than three months, and if you wish to relocate to another EU country you must apply for a Blue Card there. The Blue Card comes with a minimum salary requirement, though the salary requirement is somewhat lower for high-demand professions, which vary from country to country. To qualify for a Blue Card, you must have college degree or equivalent experience and you must be working a field related to your degree/prior experience.

In Germany, you'll need to show that your degree and its granting institution is certified in the Anabin database^[6] and you'll need an employment contract with a job title defined that shows that your degree matches the job. That job title also must be recognized; if not, you'll need your employer to provide a job description that makes clear how your background and education are relevant to the job. For instance, when I moved to Germany as a "data scientist," that job was not in their database and I had to explain how my degree in computation mathematics—not science!—was relevant to the job. They had no idea what a data scientist was!

You'll need an apostile copy of your diploma and transcripts, which you can usually request through the student records office at your university. If you are applying based on professional experience, you may need letters from your previous employers attesting to your work and what you did, as well as a curriculum vitae, or CV.^[7]

To apply for the Blue Card, you'll also need: proof of funds in the form of 3-6 months of bank statements, a German bank account, a statement of intent from your future employer, a copy of your employment contract, health insurance, a registered address, a letter from a landlord, a copy of a lease or deed (yes you need all three), a birth certificate, copies of any name change forms, and a current valid passport.^[8] If you're also moving with family, you will also need copies of birth certificates and apostilles for any marriage certificates.

The German process is maddening: to get a lease you need a credit report, to get a credit report you need a bank account, to get a bank account you need a registered address, to get a registered address you need a lease. Likewise, to get health insurance you need a job, to get a job you need a visa, to get a visa you need health insurance. There are ways to break these cycles—usually through a formal letter—but it's not clearly documented. And you usually need a connection: to get a registration, it's not enough for your friend to say that you can crash on their couch and that you have a sublease. The landlord (and sometimes the building owner, and these are not always the same people) needs to provide a written confirmation that you are allowed to reside at that address.

For me, from the time of my first interview to my start date was eight months. This process takes an exceptionally long time.

DAFT

The Dutch-American Friendship Treaty, DAFT, is something that I hear crop up as an "easy" path to a European visa for Americans. Unfortunately, it looks easier on paper than it is. The DAFT program is, among other things, a program for entrepreneurial Americans who want to move to the Netherlands to start a small business. It requires a minimum investment of €4500, which must be maintained for the period of the visa and allows for two years of residency. The business must be revenue generating during this time, though there are not necessarily limits on that revenue.

However, this program also requires you to register a business in the Netherlands. This is not impossible, but it is also not trivial. You'll have to register the business with the tax authorities and set up a business bank account. You may need a business license, depending on your line of work. You'll probably need to submit a business plan—one of those "soft" requirements that you don't strictly need but will suffer without.

All of that is in addition to all of the stuff already mentioned with the other visas: birth certificates, passports, bank acocunts, proof of funds, etc.

Citizenship by descent

Another path that is increasingly popular is to apply for citizenship in a host nation by right of blood, meaning your parents, grandparents, or other ancestors were citizens of the nation and the nation's laws grant citizenship to their descendants. Each country is different; some limit it to parents, others will allow you to get citizenship if you can prove descent going back as long as the country existed.

Doing this is very complicated and time consuming. There are no magic words or magic documents you can conjure that will grant you a passport. You need to establish some sort of proof of citizenship of your forebears, but that's alone not enough. Consider the criteria in Poland:^[9]

• Was a Polish citizen on February 20, 1919 or later;
• Left Poland after February 20, 1919 and did not emigrate to the Soviet Union;
• Did not serve in an Axis country's military, if male;
• If female, successor born after February 1952.

As you can imagine, this is a lot of paperwork to gather. You may need to hire a translator. And then when you submit it, expect more translation work, back-and-forth, and long delays. I've known several people who have gotten EU citizenship by descent. In most cases, it took a minimum of two years—and that's after they had already successfully established EU residency. If you start the process now, I would be shocked if it finished before midterm elections.

Asylum or refugee status

This topic comes up a lot, particularly from LGBTQ+ folks rightfully fearful of the impact of growing anti-LGTBQ+ legislation in the United States. I want to validate these concerns while sharing as strenuously as possible that this would be the worst decision you may ever make.

The key thesis of Trump's campaign was anti-immigrant sentiment. The same right-wing forces that drove the hateful propaganda in the United States are equally hard at work in every nation in the world. The hatred against refugees and immigrants abroad is as strong, and in some cases stronger, than it is in the United States. Refugees do not have a good time in any country. Applying for asylum is like jumping the line for the meat grinder—everything you fear that might happen in the United States is currently happening to refugees worldwide.

I recently read a collection of stories and experiences by the advocacy group, Women+ in Exile in Brandenburg and Berlin.^[10] An excerpt:

When you apply for asylum in Germany, you are sent to a camp. It is like a "mail sorting centre." Generally, you have one in each state. It is mostly built like a prison. In some states it has a dual function: It is the welcome centre and the deportation camp. In the state of Brandenburg, where we were sent, it is a welcome center that shares a fence with the deportation camp. So, you understand that it is for a short stay. When you leave this centre, you go to the deportation camp next door, or you are sent into the community. Your real life as an asylum seeker of course starts when you are sent into the community. You are driven in busses trough [sic] cities, villages, and farms to finally arrive in an abandonded building somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The Heim! Now you know that you were transferred from one prison to another. Asylum seekers in Germany live in camps and Heime!

It continues to describe the Heim:

Toilets and showers have no doors, some don't even have a curtain. They legally call these camps transitional homes for asylum seekers. The idea is to keep the asylum seekers in these homes while the administration is studying their cases. And during that time, they have have no right to school, no right to work, no right to travel out of the administrative district. However, they can live in these camps for more than ten years while the administration is still studying their case.

The humanitarian status of refugees varies country by country but nowhere is it considered to be good. Asylum seekers do not have right of movement or travel. They cannot work or go to school. They cannot own belongings aside from the bare necessities. They cannot receive visitors. The camps are rife with sexual violence, administrative violence, and racial violence. Suicides are common. Even after transitioning out of the camps, rights are limited. It can take several days to get permission to travel to a city for an appointment or a language class—and you have to go through the same process every week, sometimes multiple times a week. Applying for asylum in a country is nothing like visiting that country on vacation. It may be years before you're even able to visit a museum.

On top of all that, Americans simply will not qualify for an asylum claim. A recent study showed that between 2001 and 2021, some 14,000 Americans filed for asylum abroad.^[11] Of these, only 400 petitions were granted. That's less than 3%.

Each claim is individually assessed, so it's hard to make blanket statements about why the claims won't work. But one of the international standards for asylum is that all domestic legal remedies must be exhausted. This means that being a target of harassment or abuse is not enough—you have to file charges, ask for restraining orders, move. Living in a state with restrictive rights is not enough—you have to first prove that relocating to another state will not provide legal relief. The entirety of the United States has to be unavailable for you before you can qualify. And even then, it's not a guarantee. The paper linked above has plenty of stories of people who fled prosecution, deserted the military, or escaped domestic abuse who struggled for years to have their petitions reviewed. Many ended the years-long struggle with no outcome at all—they simply went back when the domestic situation ameliorated.

Applying for asylum is a last resort option. It's a miserable and political experience that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. It's also unlikely to succeed unless you have a truly exceptional claim. Trump's presidency is not yet one of those. And you won't qualify based on what America might become. It will take a truly exception sequence of events for this to be possible.

If you think this is your way to survival, please reconsider. I have read way too many stories of suicides, ruined lives, broken families, and lost hope to believe that asylum is the best path for survival for anyone but those in the most desperate situations: war, active genocide, massacres, and ethnic cleansing.

Conclusions

Immigrating is hard. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done. Adapting to a new culture, a new language, new rules, new habits is not as easy as it looks. Living in a country is very different than visiting it: people are generally accepting of tourists (with exceptions!) but not necessarily of immigrants. Tourists bring money and jobs into a country. Immigrants, populists want you to believe, take jobs and send money out. Whether that's true or not—and our stance is that this is nationalistic bullshit—it's impossible not to sense this perception in your everyday life in a new country. As a tourist, you never question whether you belong because you know you're only visiting. As an immigrant, you'll ask yourself this every single day. I've been to almost every country in Europe solo as a transgender woman or together with my wife and never felt unsafe; and I've met people from every country who have told me how hard life is when you're actually living there.

Think about why you want to leave and what your life will look like there. Building community is harder. Every little thing takes so much more energy than normal—I nearly had a breakdown once trying to figure out where to buy a stapler!

But if you do decide to go, then here's my final words of advice for how to prepare:

• look at the requirements for visas in your target country and prepare all your documents starting now. It will take weeks or months to get them ready;
• renew your passport if you have less than 2 years left on it;
• think about what you're going to do with your stuff: what can you donate, what should you keep. Try to move with as little as possible. You should expect that you'll need to uproot yourself many times once you arrive;
• start building community remotely now;
• start language lessons now;
• find an immigration lawyer and speak with them. Don't do this alone;
• write down all the comforts and habits that make you feel at home today, and think about what your life will be like if you don't have those. If you can't cross of at least half of them, you're going to have a hard time overseas;
• think about what you're trying to find overseas and think about what you would need to find it domestically.

Moving abroad can be a wonderful adventure. As much as I have hated learning German, I love speaking German. I love that I have the privilege to travel. I'm glad I've had the opportunity to find safety overseas. But I miss home, I miss the comforts of the land I grew up in, I miss my wife and home and family and friends. I miss the security of understanding the system and the convenience of not having to be constantly corrected in public.

It's also worth saying that moving abroad didn't make me safer. Just in the last year or so, there have been many stories of trans people being assaulted or abused in Berlin.^{[12][13][14][15][16]} A couple of years ago, a trans man was beaten to death in the middle of Pride in Münster.^[17] And neo-Nazis from Atomwaffen Division once even traveled to Germany with intent to harm me.^[18] Germany, too, is making a rightward swing and anti-migrant and anti-LGBT sentiment is driving far-right populism to the mainstream.

That doesn't mean that expatriation isn't a viable option. But to make expatriation work, there's a lot of work you need to do to prepare. Start now.