Must be nice to be able to afford to run.
It should have been clear when the police was cracking down on the university protests in 2024.
2024? Not Bush II? Full blown fascism has just been on the back burner for a long time.
We need an “I’m an academic expert on fascism. Of you see me running try and keep up” tee shirt
My therapist called me a canary in the coal mine. I’m trans, I have the means to move, basically it was a “if you leave suddenly I’ll know things have gotten really bad”. I’ve almost gotten everything lined up to move on a plan but I’m still keeping my bug out bag around in case something bad enough happens I need to leave day of to try and get past the border
Any advice for someone starting this sort of planning (beyond "you should’ve started a year ago)?
If you have ancestry from Europe, see if any of the countries have an easy path to citizenship based on that. If it’s part of the EU, you don’t have to live in the country you have citizenship in either.
Have to go pretty far up the family tree for that, sadly; they most likely came here on a wooden ship. Based on some hereditary physical traits, we’re from somewhere around France and Spain. I’m descended from Oklahoma great depression poor folk on one side and a mix of military and tradesmen on the other.
Any family who could corroborate any kind of genealogy is dead, no longer mentally there due to old age, or deeply estranged.
Have a degree? Otherwise, keep your head down and wait until some country opens up for refugees.
I’m moving to Sweden, results will vary depending where you’re looking.
Step one is to get a passport. Can’t do fuck all without a passport and I’d highly advise visiting at least nearish where you’re interested in moving to.
Then figure out how you’re going to stay there. Generally speaking this can be done in one of these ways: Finding a job, going to school, being rich, or getting married. I was originally going to look for a job but then I ran some math and determined I could afford to go to school on savings so I went with that (it’s easier to convince someone to let you pay them than it is to convince them to pay and sponsor you). If you’re trying to find a job then be good at something in demand. This varies by country but in general that means know how to program or know a trade that’s in short supply at the target country.
Compile a list of requirements and their timeline. For me getting a residency permit as a student I need: Passport, acceptance letter, insurance, proof of finances. The timeline for this is a lot messier. Proof of finances is just a day trip to the bank so I can functionally ignore it until I’m ready to send the application. Insurance is in a similar boat. The acceptance letter has been trickier. The way it works for me is I got accepted to a university, I accepted their acceptance, they’ve billed me, and now that I paid the bill I have to wait for their official acceptance letter I can use for the residency permit. Other requirements for moving but not necessarily applying for residency are things like I need a personnummer. At first I thought I needed this as part of the application but it actually turns out I can’t even apply for one until I’m living in Sweden. So for the timeline it gets shoved back to ‘in the future’ so I can focus on other stuff. There are a lot of moving parts and most of it is ‘turn something in and wait for a month’ so you want to make sure you’re multitasking on the right things at the right time which is where the timeline comes in handy.
Figure out a solution for two factor that isn’t texting your US number because good luck getting into your bank account when it’s trying to ping a sim card that doesn’t work in Sweden lol. Things you find out when you’re traveling that’s good to know before moving.
Learn about the housing market. Housing in Sweden is fucked and I am late to the game getting into a place so now I’m fucked too. Likely I will not be able to bring my cat because of it and I may not ever be able to bring him if I can’t line things up properly. Part of what messed me up is I didn’t know where I was going to university until recently and I didn’t have the capacity to be applying to housing across half of Sweden.
Have a good support system. Go online and ask for someone living in your target country to do you a favor and marry you. Failing that ask them to just generally help with things like “translate keeps butchering this page what the hell does it say”. A buddy willing to get back to you within a day or two can help dramatically with all this. It’s stressful as hell so try having a good support system in place locally too. Part of why I’m moving is most my support system fell out from under me and I was like ‘fuckit I’m moving’ and let me tell you I spend a lot of my free time crying uncontrollably because I don’t have people to console me in person. It’s not fun 0/10 try to have some good friends.
Look at everything you own and accept the fact that none of it is worth bringing with you. What do I mean by everything? I mean if it isn’t your identification paperwork or the waterproof backpack to hold the paperwork, it is secondary. Whatever you use to access the modern world, phone/laptop/etc, is also really important but with some elbow grease you can start that from scratch in a new place. Literally everything else I would consider to be icing. Make peace with this.
Be ready to lose a lot of money. In order for me to get the residency permit I need accepted to a college which means application fees and a deposit. In order to not be homeless I need a home which means a deposit and probably a contract. To bring my cat over I need to set up vet stuff and have a lot of difficult to time things arranged. I don’t know if I have a residency permit yet. So in theory I could pay the college deposit, pay a rental deposit, and set in motion moving my cat, and a month from now Sweden could tell me tough titties. Hope you can find a place to live in the US with a week’s notice now that you’ve left your job and didn’t renew your old lease.
Be born with Irish grandparents.
Hah! I wish. Last 4+ generations of my family were born in the US.
Ehhmm… Would you happen to need a live in maid, assistant, gardener, groundskeeper…anything wherever you end up? Asking for a friend.
Straight up if I find a place with enough space and I can afford the rent, I’m going to try and bring in another person and give them free or greatly reduced rent. I can’t help with the residency permit stuff but helping someone land is the least I can do
Same as the other comment. That’s very generous of you.
Housing is pretty much the main concern for me regarding moving at this time.
You are a kind soul. We need more of you.
If you see me running, try to keep up*
They’re fascism experts, not grammar experts
They study Nazis, not grammar nazis
White Nazis, not right Nazis.
Or… Write Nazis
Oh, it opens with a 6min unskippable video. instead of an article, on a website that still has the line “Today’s Paper” at the top of the page.
At this point I’m convinced that the NYT is living in the 2000s.
Good for them.
Well, I’m glad you have the privilege to do so, I suppose.
Well, why don’t the 250 million Americans who didn’t vote for trump just also move to Canada???
Well at least you can exclude roughly 81 million eligible non voters. Fuck em.
Would be nice but you can’t simply move to any other country you want. Other countries have enacted similar stupid immigration laws just like the US. There isn’t a single country where US citizens can just move (except the US of course). It’s like a curse. The orange in the WH would need to do something really f’ed for other countries to accept american asylum applications. personally I wish I could just bag and go
It’s great when people on your side of the border hate you because you support human rights, and people on the other side of the border hate you because of where you were born and lived untill recently.
Also simultaneously being told “you should just leave your shit hole country” from one group of people and also “you should stay and fix your own stupid country before you try and ruin others”
Basically “fuck you for existing, now go die quietly so we can get on with our lives”
And don’t even get me started on any sort of minority group and how shitty they have it here. Can’t even walk to the corner store without looking over their shoulder for ICE or some other thug law enforcement.
Slight exception, there is Svalbard I believe which has no visas required to live there. It is frozen though.
They could just take a few weeks off of work all at once and watch the government come to its knees.
Someone once told me to just apply to be a refugee and move to Canada, as a response to complaining about trump supporters in my area. They weren’t even a trump supporter themselves. Bruh, I doubt Canada wants my disabled and out of work ass, even if it was just that simple.
No, they dont,
just like how the US doesn’t want the dumbshit “my way or the highway” western canadian separatists.immigration is difficult, you’ve got to be extremely rich, smart and highly skilled in a marketable and demanded field, or lucky.
most people are none of these things
You can’t apply for refugee status from the US to Canada anyway
You don’t need refugee status to move somewhere tho. In the case of Canada you mostly just need to prove you can support yourself, and pass an English or French proficiency test.
Not that simple, no.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada.html
From the US you would need to be skilled in something that we need, otherwise you can start as a tourist for 6 months and you need to apply to stay longer. Just because you can support yourself (let’s say you work remotely for a US company while living in Canada) it doesn’t mean that you can stay just because you speak English.
Right, I looked into that website earlier in the year I think. Even for “high demand” jobs in the US like tech, it’s not easy to get into Canada.
Especially at a moment where the population is getting pretty angry that there’s a housing shortage after years of mass immigration
I read the summary on the archive page. I’m not impressed.
Let’s go with the premise that I believe that the American fascist movement is here. So what do I do with that? We can’t all just move to Toronto, and if we could it wouldn’t help anyone else. So…?
Must be nice.
Well we all know that Fascism experts are the least important people to have around when Fascism takes over a country.
Technically you can criticize from afar but it’s good to have fascism experts on the front lines.
This is also an incredibly privileged thing to be able to do and one that the vast majority of the most vulnerable and likely to be on the camp list are stuck here and would like some experts to help fight back.
Well we all know that Fascism experts are the least important people to have around when Fascism takes over a country.
Historically nobody fucking listens to fascism experts so yeah that’s true. Looking at the pace Trump is democracy at and the state of “resistance” to his regime, I’d bail too, and I didn’t spend my whole career studying the horrors of fascism.
The thing they are good for us as a canary in a coal mine, which is why they publish this.
Most miners would act when the candy dies out of experience. Most people with poor understanding of history lack the experience.
Good idea - it’s best to study fascism from a healthy distance.
Well, that was a little terrifying
considering the actions of the current administration it would have probably been better to publish this after leaving the US
If they were genuinely afraid, sure.
I suspect they’re willing to take the risk to try and warn others. This is sort of a middle ground approach. They’re banking on Trump not being able to retaliate in time before they leave the country, he’s moving fast, but he’s not at the imprison political opponents stage yet. He will be soon, but they’ve got some time.
In the meantime, it serves as a warning to us and others to get out if you can.
To be fair many of the US media outlets, among which is also the New York Times often refused to call out the utter nonsense that Trump was spewing during the campaign. This is also a reason it has come to the current situation.
