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Like many Portlanders, I'm at the point in my day where the shock of the Trump upset has begun to turn to a hellish ambivalence of "I should have seen this coming," "Now what?" and a kind of omnipresent mental white noise. Like many Portlanders, my Facebook feed is full of people grimly re-posting that dumb story about the Canadian immigration website crashing. Like many Portlanders, I don't really know what to do.
But I know what not to do: move to New Zealand.
In 2004, when I was 14 years old, my family— my mother, stepfather (a New Zealand citizen), my little brother and I— relocated to New Zealand. This happened for a bundle of reasons, but one of them bears directly on today's news: a Republican presidency.
Specifically, the Iraq war. Remember that wacky incursion? By 2004, the Iraq war was in the middle of its degeneration into sectarian bloodbath, and there were rumors that that the draft might be reinstated to combat the worsening situation overseas.
My mother was scared shitless of having her teenage kids getting drafted, so we relocated halfway across the world.
I lived in New Zealand until 2014, attending both high school and college in a decent little city called Dunedin. It had its ups—meeting my wife and many good friends, cheap education (college was about a quarter of what it costs in the United States, law school, a fraction) and healthcare— and its downs (more on those in a second.)
But living in New Zealand certainly did not make our lives any easier.
The vast majority of the "That's it: we're leaving!" people are expressing grief and outrage at the thought of a Trump presidency. But let me fill you in on what to expect should you decide to make a leap to another country to try to escape. If this sounds like something you can handle, by all means, embark on your new life in Manitoba. But don't expect a smooth ride.
1) Many People Will Deeply Resent You For Being American.
You didn't vote for Trump, right? Too fucking bad. Congratulations: As an American expatriate, you'll be personally involved in every policy decision made by the Trump government, and will be required to answer for said decisions as soon as they come up in any conversation, with any person.
Until Obama was elected at the end of my first year of college, my family and I had to endure regular interrogations about our personal moral responsibility for the Iraq war and every other shitty thing the Bush administration did for the prior eight years. No matter if your family is comprised of dyed-in-the-wool Dems, or that New Zealand faces many of the same social problems that the United States does (God help you if you bring those up), you'll have to answer for every transgression at a moment's notice.
Be prepared to have every personal belief of yours dismissed with "that's just 'cause you're American." Be prepared to have an acquaintance, 30 years your senior, greet you with "So, who have you bombed today?" Be prepared for unprompted scoldings from your morally superior hosts about decisions that you neither agree with nor had anything to do with.
And don't prepare for that to end once a Democratic president gets elected. Get ready for the sanctimony to hit overdrive when they find our your liberal president is sanctioning drone strikes in the Middle East. You're responsible for that, too.
2) It's really hard to move overseas unless you have a lot of money.
After my parent's divorce, my single mother built a successful small garden design business basically by herself, with no money, that she ran out of our modest Minneapolis house. She sold that and the house to finance the move, and already had a house lined up in New Zealand. About $250k should be enough to get you situated, right?
Within about two years, we were broke.
Good luck getting a job in a country where you don't know a single person to vouch for you, where your experience isn't particularly recognizable and where you're expected to beat out locals who've been working in an industry for years.
"But of course I'll have a job lined up before I move, Walker— I'm not an idiot." She had one of those— a nice spot at the equivalent of a community college. That fell through when we got there.
After 18 months of soul-crushing unemployment, our family went from being middle class to living paycheck to paycheck, my stepfather becoming a careworker and my mother bouncing from jobs until she landed a scholarship intended to provide enough money for a grad student, not a family of four.
Unless you're independently wealthy—in which case it doesn't matter what you do, your life is awesome—be prepared for a drastic downgrade in your quality of life. Speaking of which…
3) Expect to badly miss everything you're used to in the United States.
Go outside. You feel that damp, chilly Portland November? Imagine it was 10 degrees colder and rainier. Now go inside. Instead of that nice central heating, imagine it's that same November cold, but just as damp. Inside. For 10 months of the year.
Welcome to Dunedin.
Most of New Zealand is freezing fucking cold— a creeping, damp, inescapable cold that follows you into your home and penetrates your clothing. You'll be warm maybe 20 percent of the time.
You'll miss being warm, dearly. You'll miss decent pizza. You'll miss the rest of your family, you'll miss football, you'll miss HBO, you'll miss Taco Bell.
You won't miss health insurance—the single payer system is great—but you will miss a lot, and that first visit back to the U.S. will feel like jumping 20 years into the future.
You'll miss these things so much that you'll jump at the chance to befriend other Americans and Canadians (close enough), with whom you'll build shared cultural bonds of "not understanding why everyone thinks I personally invaded Iraq."
4) You'll become much more patriotic.
As soon as that first wave of mundane problems hits—car trouble, groceries, bills—you'll realize that your life isn't fundamentally different than it was in the United States, except now you're broke. As soon as you hear people scaremonger about Chinese immigration, or bitch about how New Zealand's native Maori people get special treatment, you'll realize that these countries mostly have the same problems and that you'll have to fight against them no matter where you are.
As it turns out, having people constantly tell you that your country sucks while you're cold and damp (inside your own apartment, in summer) will make you really realize that it is mostly really nice to live in the United States.
5) You'll develop a lot of empathy.
I can't imagine what it's like to come to the United States as someone in a position not nearly as fortunate as we were when we moved to New Zealand. It's a miracle that we had enough money to afford a house and keep ourselves afloat while my folks were looking for work. Trying to do this with no money in our pockets or not speaking English is unthinkable.
But I know that if it sucked for us, it must be almost unbearable for the people who now face a government that's openly hostile to their existence. So instead of high-tailing it out of here, I'm going to stay and try to make the United States livable for those who truly face a hard, dry fuck of a next four years.
Willamette Week