In the last week alone I have received three emails from Australians seeking advice on how to emigrate from Australia. I recently made a joke that I should set up a consultancy firm to do this, but for anyone with the experience that I have in this area that is now a real potential to make some money. I am not going to do so, however, as I do not have the time or inclination, and nor do I want the added responsibility. Moving overseas is hard and a lot of people can’t make it stick. I have the feeling that the consultancy firm that helped someone to make their failed move would come under some legal pressure. So I’m not interested.
If the inquiries that I am receiving are a snapshot of the broader world at large then there must be an awful lot of folks trying to work out right now how to get out of their native lands. As an example, this opinion piece by Linh Dinh explores the general lunacy that is ongoing from his own perspective as a world traveler on the cheap with a nuanced eye for the people with whom he comes into contact. But it was the comments after the piece that caught my eye.
Hi Linh, Great essay, for us (olga an I) we are thinking about moving to Spain, which the Supreme Court has outlawed Vaccine passports and Lockdowns! It’s a pain in the ass at my age but must be done to survive! Cheers, Tom from France
How many more people now find themselves in the same boat? A good many I would wager. But this raises the inherent riskiness of moving at the present time. Not only is it costly to move but with the governments of the world flip-flopping from one extreme position to another during this fake pandemic, you might discover that the safe Covid haven to which you have recently arrived suddenly becomes a Covid pariah state literally overnight.
There is also the uncomfortable nugget of truth that the time to move has already come and gone. I left Australia finally for good in 2017, and my driving motivation was to excuse myself from the totalitarian state that the country had become. Covid has not transformed Australia into a totalitarian state. Rather, it has revealed what was always there. For anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time living overseas, coming back to Australia is a very rude shock. For example, no other country in the world, except perhaps the United Kingdom, devotes itself with such glee to the process of trying to catch its citizens in the act of driving a vehicle after a couple of drinks. I drive about 25,000 kilometers a year, and after four years in The Netherlands the total number of times that I have been stopped by the police is zero. In ten years in Italy I got stopped twice and both times I charmingly talked my way out of a ticket.
The way that Australians live and what they put up with from governments and government entities at all levels is not normal. As I said, this was very clear to me and so I left. That was the time to leave. I don’t know if the moment has passed but if you do want to pick up sticks and move overseas the biggest obstacle to your successful escape is choosing a destination. Exactly where do you go?
Well, let’s begin to remove countries from the list. First off, you can forget about any of the other Anglo-Saxon nations that are also suffering from the same Anglo-Saxon disease that has infested Australia. So the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the USA are all unacceptable choices. Next, any country that is part of the EU is a woeful idea because they are all ultimately subservient to bureaucrats in Brussels. They might posture about resisting Brussels but ultimately they are all too addicted to the cash and baubles. Leaving France for Spain is beyond useless.
The majority of countries in Asia have gone full retard with the vaccination decrees, Vietnam being a particularly egregious example. I have heard that South American nations are not much better. Some of the nations that made up the former Soviet Union are real possibilities, with Russia itself perhaps the most attractive of them all. Which is rather ironic when you think about recent world history. However, others such as Lithuania have also gone full Covid retard.
Is there a bright shining light of a nation in the world that is a beacon of hope for those fleeing Covid persecution? The answer as far as I know is in the negative.
The costs of moving have also gone up. Shipping freight is now eye wateringly expensive and with severe delays. One advantage for those in Australia who own a home is that you can get a lot of money for it. So if you move to a nation with comparatively cheap housing then that is a starting advantage. Being single or married with no kids makes moving vastly more simple as well.
But the most important question that you need to ask yourself when you move to your new country is what are you going to do for a living? Australians are mostly under the mistaken and naïve belief that they will be treated in their new countries the same way that Australians have treated immigrants over the past seventy years. In other words, if you move to Australia as an obvious outsider there are little to no cultural and social impediments to you setting up a business in the sector of your choice. But in many other parts of the world, newcomers to a nation can find that many avenues for such entrepreneurship are closed to them, and often violently so.
There are many more obstacles that I could go into but this is an article, not a book. Ultimately, the best way to move is to up sticks and go. It will be expensive, it will be stressful; if your relationship is flawed this will peel open the cracks in a very short time, but at the end of the day you only need the following things to survive:
A roof over your head, food to eat, and a way to maintain the two.
The time to move was years ago but the time to move is also now as the rush is yet to begin. Those who go first will do the best, while those who wait the longest risk losing everything. In the end, the real key is to make it stick. Integrate in your new land and avoid your fellow countrymen like the plague. If you move to Russia, for example, you had better do your darn best to become as Russian as you possibly can. Because if the trickle of Covid refugees becomes a flood then other nations may no longer be so welcoming.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.