CBS Correspondent Asks "Where to Emigrate?"
A CBS correspondent writes in with thoughts about the "Amerikanskiy Zones" mentioned in the June 22nd Links:
The ‘Amerikanskiy Zone’ in the June 22 link round-up struck a nerve. I remember reading that article when it was first published and largely rolling my eyes. It struck me as the usual Internet mental masturbation aimed at an audience of single, 20-something males. However, recently I’m seeing emigration talk coming from a much broader, and much older and wiser cohort. It seems to be slipping into the zeitgeist and it’s gotten me thinking.
Remarkably to me, I now have a new-found, practical desire to emigrate that I never had previously. By practical, I mean it’s more than just a wish for something to do if everything were perfect… rich enough, kids old enough, family entanglements dis-entagled enough, etc. — it is more than merely something I have on my bucket list. It’s now something I’m considering seriously as necessary.
So what’s changed? In short, I think US immigration policy — and Trump’s inability to move the needle on it — has holed the country below the waterline. The bald race-baiting by radical progressives aimed at dis-enfranchising white Americans is unique in American history. The rioting we’ve seen the last month is unique from prior radical outbursts due to our multi-ethnic composition. Time may heal all wounds, but speaking from experience it does not heal low human-capital immigration.
Growing up outside of Detroit in the 1970’s, I know well the social dysfunction brought on by bad immigration is a difference in-kind from what one gets with normal economic cycles which people outside the Midwest do not appreciate. If you are from there and look at the lasting effects of the Great Migration on the upper Midwest, it is heart-breaking. It is the difference between secular decline and cyclical decline.
The heavy-lifting of the 1980’s and 1990’s tech boom was done by considerable poaching of Midwest engineering talent. (H-1B scabs were, relatively speaking, a much later phenomenon that did not begin until the mid 1990’s.) There are a lot of reasons for geographical specialization that takes place, and why we have the Silicon Valley, not the Silicon Prairie. One reason not discussed is that growing up in the Midwest there was a clear undertone that the best and brightest left for college and never came back. It became a self-fullfilling prophecy… if you didn’t leave you clearly weren’t among the best and brightest. What enterprising young man looking to stake his claim on the world wants to be thought of less than among the best and brightest? My point is there was no shortage of talent in the Midwest. The Midwest brain drain was a result of wanting to escape the civic dysfunction brought to the region by the Great Migration. This was irrespective of the manufacturing decline that took place.
In the 70's & early 80's many people at the time thought that the US was in a secular decline. The late 80's and the 90's challenged that conclusion and I think for the last 20 to 25 years when recessions hit the public met them with a certain equanimity. Each recession was a bump in the road but the arc of economic growth inevitably yielded to increased prosperity.
Seeing a second Great Migration, this time not from the South to the Midwest, but from every "shithole" country to every mid to large size city in every state in the Union from Maine to California, and the complete failure of the Trump administration to roll back any of it, leaves me black-pilled on the future of the country. Like the upper Midwest, I don't think it can be recovered from. Worse, if Biden wins this November, there is going to be a complete doubling-down by Obama retreads. They'll be in the Executive Branch feeling like they have to make up for 4 years of lost time. I fear it will be like when Central Banks decide 10 yrs of (faked) 0% inflation need to be made-up for in the next 4 years.
Previously I always wished for an escape country. Many times when challenged by my wife with “well, where should we go!” I lamented that Globalism had done the same thing to every English-speaking country and that there wasn't any place to go. Now, to show how much more serious I am about the situation I'm of the mind that English isn't important. I am now of the mind that any country with a deep enough European gene-pool for our children to marry into is sufficient.
Speaking of our children’s future, it brings up another consideration in which I have changed my thinking 180 degrees. It is roundly purported American women are the most entitled, least marriageable women on the planet. Ironically given my prior reservations, maybe I would be doing them a great service moving to a foreign country while they are still young enough to culturally assimilate and find love and a marriage partner. This changes everything. If the best hope for my children’s future lies in a foreign, non-English speaking country time is essential. We cannot wait for everything to be perfect. We would need to emigrate as soon as practicable.
While we live in California, I have not won the options lottery and we do not own a home from which we can cash out several 6 figures of equity. We are not at all wealthy enough to leave the US and maintain our standard of living in any form or fashion into the indefinite future. Maybe that's for the better too. Maybe that's how it has to be... cut all ties and go.
What I don't see happening is how the country can pull back from the brink it finds itself at. Indeed, there are plenty of indications to suggest we've actually gone over the edge. There may be no going back.
The last decade has cost the 1% nothing. The last 6 months have cost them nothing. If anything bad that happens to the country costs them nothing, there's no reason to believe that they think there is anything that needs changing. From their perspective nothing is broken. The rioting in the streets they rationalize as Trump's fault and their social bubble all nod in agreement.
The question I have for CBS readers: Am I wrong? What country has the brightest future that is also reasonably accessible to an American family of modest means?
19 comments:
Original author here.
To get the conversation started, Argentina sounds interesting to me. It is mentioned in Bill Buford's "Heat" (a CBS book review), and in a recent link fest.
I'm serious about this. Is Argentina legit? I want to hear folks' best ideas for countries.
Vietnam is the correct answer. You can live like Kings. South America is too sketchy. Need to live a place with Buddhist values. Thailand is too expensive for the difference in standard of living. Saigon if you want city living, Da Nang if you want beach living.
You want cheap european living: southern spain/portugal, bohemia in czechia, or krakow in poland.
Agreed.
The anti white in this country has gone full libtard. The surprising aspect are the useful white idiots who aid and abed their own diminishing in a country that owes its greatness to the white male.
Why they willfully and eagerly seek 3rd rate status is quite the phenomenon. I've always said and think its true that whites are pathetically altruistic to a point they are willing to self destruct unlike any other group on the planet.
Its true the U.S. used to seek quality European immigrants who got nothing to come here but did and hit the ground running to work their way up. These newbies go strait on the dole and seek special treatments and benefits and start right in with the leftist racial whining.
All systems can only support so many deadbeats. Even the U.S. has a limit. We have to be nearing that limit where the country either rolls over into 3rd world status or it rights itself . The left thinks this country can take a unlimited number of lowlifes and still prosper. Trump has tried but he is overwhelmed by the left. I don't think it can right itself anymore.
I lived in Argentina 12-13 years ago, and it was similar to the U.S. culturally. By the time I got there, any kind of conservative influence from the Catholic Church had vanished. Half of the women I met had fake tits and/or tramp stamps (the tattoos are probably different today).
Imagine a parallel universe where Americans are pervasively inept, lazy, and corrupt, and you'll have an idea of what Argentina is like.
It is roundly purported American women are the most entitled, least marriageable women on the planet. Ironically given my prior reservations, maybe I would be doing them a great service moving to a foreign country while they are still young enough to culturally assimilate and find love and a marriage partner.
In my experience, growing up in the U.S. but traveling extensively and living in several other countries, sexual degeneracy is the norm everywhere in the West. Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, Latin America are all in different stages of the same cultural rot. In parts of E. Europe there are politicians who speak out against liberalism, but IMO that is signaling to their base and they don't have any real willingness to deal with the problem nor any real solutions. Orban bloviates about his country and its proud traditions, but Hungary is full of porn studios and gypsies. I doubt daily life there would be better than daily life in most of the U.S.
The most culturally conservative country I've been to is Turkey, but it has other problems. Social trust is very low, and there is a pervasive attitude that trust and cooperation are for suckers. If you live there, any big transaction you do, you'll have to guard against being cheated or screwed over.
I don't think there is an easy escape. Sorry.
I'm not looking for the best place to arb US dollars for standard of living. Short of extreme low cost-of-living places like Vietnam, we would almost certainly need to find employment for ourselves within 2-3 years. Our kids will need a place with careers available to it.
I'm looking for the best place to start-over for our kids' future. I want them to find love and a fulfilling life in the country we emigrate to.
Skip South America.
Fernando "Ferfal" Aguirre, editor of The Modern Survivalist website and The Modern Survivalist YouTube channel, moved from Argentina to Northern Ireland with his wife and two children because, he said, Argentina is too dangerous. He mentioned an Argentine doctor who was killed in a gunfight with five robbers.
He said home invasions by armed gunmen were frequent in Buenas Aires.
In Argentina, he carried a pistol loaded with high-powered Sig .357 cartridges everywhere he went.
It wasn't restful. So, he moved to a different country.
Go here for more survival data from Ferfal: http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/tag/ferfal
He considered other South American countries and rejected all of them as too violent.
No place in South America or Africa will work.
Go to a country that has a high average IQ.
You will be better off if you can tolerate cold winter temperatures, and learn a new language.
Jesus Christ. Is this a joke? You must be some kind of entitled schmuck (“I want my kids to find love and a fulfilling life in the country we emigrate to”). How about teaching your kids that they’ll get what they deserve. If they want a fulfilling life, they need to earn it. And they can find one anywhere.
My guess is you’ll be miserable and unsatisfied wherever you go because nothing will ever be good enough.
My advice? Move to Mexico, work in a factory making 10 cents an hour and maybe learn that you’re no better than anyone else.
@whydibuy
The left thinks this country can take a unlimited number of lowlifes and still prosper. Trump has tried but he is overwhelmed by the left. I don't think it can right itself anymore.
I think the Left thinks the country can take an unlimited number of lowlifes and the Left will still prosper. They are certain they will be the Brahmins in the future multi-ethnic, poly-glot, centrally-managed credential-ocracy.
As far as the country righting itself, unfortunately I have little cause to disagree. Trump was supposed to be the great restorer. He's been attacked from all sides, and seems to have failed. If he's a one-term president it is doubtful to me any of his achievements will last beyond a Biden term.
@J.P. & Anonymous
Thanks for the thoughtful input. Not what I wanted to hear, but good to know.
I have to ask... how much of this a Buenos Aires thing? If you judged the USA by Baltimore or Chicago or (when I was a kid) Detroit you'd come to a very incorrect conclusion. Again, I'm not worried about the USA today, I'm worried about the USA in 15 years when my kids should be married and soon to be having kids themselves.
Along those lines, is Argentina dealing with their economic hardship the last number of years in a positive fashion that is building up the social contract or is it spiraling downward, like Venezuela to pick an obvious example? Maybe Venezuela is scaring the rest of South America straight? I have no idea, what the situation is down there, but I trust the astuteness of CBS commenters.
@Phaedrus
Sacrificing for the best interests of your own kids is the opposite of an entitled jerk. Go back to Facebook, you jerk.
Correspondent,
I lived in Buenos Aires the whole time I was there, so I can't write much about the rest of Argentina. I know there are some cultural differences: for instance, tango is a big part of the traditions of Gran Buenos Aires but isn't really a thing elsewhere. My guess is that the more rural parts of the country are more conservative than B.A., but Cordoba (the 2nd-largest city) is a university town and probably not very traditional. Demographics vary across regions. The northern provinces bordering Bolivia and Paraguay are poorer and more indigenous than the rest of the country.
B.A. itself isn't similar to Detroit or Baltimore. It has bad neighborhoods and several large slums, but other parts of the city are quite nice. The slums are full of migrants--some from rural Argentina, but most from Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru. Peronist governments have generally refused to do anything about them (sound familiar?).
Corruption and bad government are problems all over Argentina. It has a federal system in which the central government is required to distribute a big share of its tax revenue to the provinces, which the provincial governors have discretion over and use to build patronage networks. The governors and other local/regional powers also control the nomination of congressional candidates, which impedes political reform.
IMO Argentina isn't learning from its problems or imploding; it seems to be repeating the same mistakes again and again in a dysfunctional kind of stasis. I doubt that Venezuela has changed many people's opinions. Chavez was always controversial in the rest of South America; I'd guess that an equal number of people admired him and disliked him.
Stay and fight for America, no need to run off, good times are coming.
I don't care what anybody says, you have a target on your back, as an American, in any other country.
@J.P.
Again, thanks for the thorough reply.
I don't think there's anywhere to go that won't create as many or more problems than it solves. Like others have said, read FerFAL.
The cities are filling up with dysfunction so move to the countryside and establish a small homestead with like-minded people nearby like the small towns throughout Europe. You can also create security within your own neighborhood.
The problem is not the immigrants: it's other white people. Almost all of the people pushing the new Critical Race Theory are white or were trained by whites in the universities. These Leftists have begun eating their own, so just be patient, raise a family, and realize you can't escape hard times. The whole nation-state system seems to be dissolving.
From Aaron Renn:
Back in Masc #24 I put together this 2x2 matrix of potential responses to institutional decline, defined by the axes of invest-disinvest and defend-attack.
In it I noted that conservatives tend to almost default to the bottom left Withdraw and Restart quadrant. By contrast, the left tends towards the attacking Capture strategies of the upper right.
This idea of withdrawing and starting over or switching to a new institution is what Albert O. Hirschman called “Exit” in his 1970 classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I can’t begin to do this book justice here, but would definitely recommend it as it contains a lot of stimulating thought on various dynamics of reforming organizations. I consider Exit a fundamentally defensive strategy. It’s about withdrawing and attempting to escape to someplace else free of our opponents or enemies.
Hirschman observes, “Exit has been accorded an extraordinarily privileged position in the American tradition.” That shouldn’t be surprising. After all, people who chose Exit settled this nation, followed by immigrants likewise pursing an Exit strategy. The marketplace, which occupies such a central place in the American consciousness, is built on the idea of Exit. If I don’t like what Company A has to offer, I’ll just switch to Company B. And this willingness to switch is what makes the motor of the marketplace function at all.
A friend of mine in Germany is fond of saying that, “We’re the children of the people who stayed.” That would make Americans the children of the people who left.
https://www.aaronrenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-Masculinist-42-Why-You-Should-Be-on-the-Advance-Not-the-Retreat.pdf
Great article and perfectly captures something I've noticed. Interestingly, right after reading it, I came across this comment on another blog:
O’Sullivan’s Law says that any organization not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing. Meaning, if you want apolitical spaces in the culture, they have to be grassroots labors of love. Institutional juggernauts get captured by the managerial class, rent-seekers, catladies, etc.
Is it nature or nurture? I think Renn and O'Sullivan are suggesting it's nature. I'm old enough to remember Jonah Goldberg and NRO from the mid & late 1990's. He often commented Conservatives never conserved anything because they were so quick to tactically retreat and think that all they had to do was recreate whatever institution it was that they were leaving behind, and that such thinking was their folly. You cannot create a new Harvard, a new 'paper of record', or a new mainline religious denomination.
I am one typically inclined to stay and fight, but it takes brothers-in-arms. In my experience it's tough for a small-c conservative to get a critical mass of brothers to mount a lasting counter-offense. It is just not in conservatives' nature.
On the other hand, the replies in this thread suggest it is different this time. There seems to be no places remaining for the modern kulak to exit to.
I don't know. I don't feel I have answers here, only questions.
"I am one typically inclined to stay and fight, but it takes brothers-in-arms. In my experience it's tough for a small-c conservative to get a critical mass of brothers to mount a lasting counter-offense. It is just not in conservatives' nature."
I was going to post Aaron Renn's latest but CP beat me to it.
Conservatives are going to have to take a hard look in the mirror and decide if they want to be winners or losers. They've decided to be losers for the past 100 years. Winning means defeating the enemy and not being nice. Take a look at the liberal mainline Presbyterian church: sure there have been conservative offshoots but they're all a tiny fraction of their former selves. The biggest one - the PCA - is going liberal itself. Exit is no longer a solution. It worked for awhile and doesn't work anymore.
My guess is that conservatives of the past didn't really believe their backs were against the wall and chose various forms of exit such as homeschooling, the suburbs - whatever the Left allowed. Each time they exited, their numbers decreased, the Overton window shrank, and so did their opportunities. "Peace in our time." Fine, but what about the next generation? Either we have to hope everything completely collapses or we have to reform/replace institutions. There is no exit.
There is nowhere to flee to anymore, and the rising tide of growth has stopped. All of us are going to be like Brooks Brothers dude at some point. He invested his life in that house, and he it was either fight or lose it. We will have to figure out that two can play the antifa game. They can't arrest all of us. When the white males decide this shit is over, it's over in a few months. It is, and always has been, a matter of will, not strength. It's a huge coordination problem though. No one wants to be first and risk no one following. Perhaps we have our own George Floyd moment at some point in the future.
White resistance will be a function of three things:
* how bad the oppression is
* how much whites have to lose
* the ability of the system to oppose their resistance
Right now whites have a lot to lose, but when the bubble pops they will have less. And when the bubble pops the system will no longer have unlimited resources.
I would imagine that if present trends continue, by the end of this decade we will see unprecedented types of resistance:
* targeted assassination (by all sides) of journalists, influential Tweeters, politicians and judicial workers
* sabotage of critical infrastructure (by all sides)
* hostage takings, kidnappings, and bombings (by all sides)
In 1995, Chechen separatists took 2,000 hostages in a Russian city of 60,000 (shooting 100 civilians in the process).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budyonnovsk_hospital_hostage_crisis
The logic of political violence is best understood by considering the way Progressives frame their anti-speech pogroms. They keep equaling words and ideas that vex them with violence. For example, someone posting crime statistics on Twitter is accused of posting violent content or inciting violence. At the same time, BLM burning shops and murdering young white mothers is pure political expression. Language they don’t like is violence and violence they like is free expression.
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20892
In 1965 there was a neighborhood arson campaign in North Minneapolis that was meant to start ridding Minneapolis of White people. The plan was for all of Minneapolis' Jews to move from North Minneapolis to St Louis Park to make room for a mass of negroes to be brought from Mississippi and Alabama.
Once they were in North Minneapolis, southern negroes could rid Minneapolis of Whites.
Plymouth Avenue, the North Minneapolis business street that burned, had been the business street of a Jewish ghetto that housed about 12,000 Jews. When St Louis Park was ready, these Jews quietly moved there from North Minneapolis, in a body, without a public word of it leaking.
Goyim did not, indeed could not, get the memo that told Jews when to leave. Arson, mugging, robbery, assaults, rapes and murder motivated Whites to go.
The fires this summer along Lake Street are meant to free up that property so that a new, non-White population can move to new housing that is to be built along Lake Street. The non-Whites in the new housing will work at voting fraud.
The current operation is meant to drive Whites from Lake Street, Uptown, the city lakes and Linden Hill. Uptown will disappear as a resource for Whites. Minneapolis will disappear as a resource, too.
This is all according to a plan that stretches back more than a hundred years. The people coordinating this multi-generational operation feel that they are strong enough, now, to win a civil war. They feel they have imported enough non-Whites to get it done.
The BLM/Antifa riots are a demonstration of power. The economic desperation caused by the COVID-19 lock down is part of it. It causes economic desperation similar to that caused by the economic depression engineered in 1929.
The uniform praise of black lives that appears in all the mass media is enforced by money lenders at the highest level. It identifies the riots as astro turf, as does the preponderance of young Whites among the BLM marchers.
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