 Something that’s been on my mind for a while: Sometimes I read Americans here having very absolutist ideas on ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’. For example, ‘why do people live in Dubai when it’s an autocracy?’ I can tell you why. My Syrian friends, who no longer have a home, live there because they won’t ever get a visa for the U.S., nor anywhere else in the western world. My skilled Iranian best friend who just got his life upended by a Canadian visa that took 3 whole years then rejected. 11 comments
For the vast majority of people with good passports (myself included), you may emigrate but your immigrant calculus is completely different. Especially if you are emigrating not because you have too, but because you want to. There are doors open to us that will never be even slightly ajar for many others.  @skinnylatte something like 40% of americans have never traveled abroad. and from those who have traveled, it's a minuscule % that has done so more than twice. what's worse? there's even bigger swaths of the people who have never traveled to other states. the wealth of Americans is completely a mirage. the oligarchy is so parasitic that it's them that skew the numbers, not even their millionaire minions.  @skinnylatte there are so many Americans I talk to who just assume anyone with any passport can get into any country and it's basically free movement everywhere in the world. @darius That’s not even true for Americans who want to leave and live somewhere more permanently (beyond a tourist visa)  @skinnylatte Heck, a lot of the Central Americans at the border are just trying to survive. They can't be even slightly safe from criminal or government persecution without crossing the Rio Grande. @skinnylatte People have some wild, wild ideas about how easy it is to leave places and/or go elsewhere. Even the "I'm gonna move to Canada!" statements made famous 20+ years ago in the US... it's so fucking hard to move to Canada. It's SO HARD TO LEAVE THE US. It's SO HARD TO ENTER THE US. None of this shit is easy. You have shockingly little agency in any of it. It's also bizarre reckoning on American's parts given they only really inflect upon the supposed self governance seldom, are functionally detached from decision making between those inflections, only have supposed recourse in ejecting bad actors but not undoing their mandates and policies, and so on and so on and so on, where...yeah, the day to day life isn't exactly that different and the special days where it is just contribute to self deluding farce of differences. @ciggysmokebringer I mean there’s stuff like ‘as an immigrant you can probably be involved in some protests and in some causes and be fine’ in most of the U.S. vs ‘Dubai and Singapore will deport you as a foreigner immediately for saying ‘Burma should be free’ or ‘we shouldn’t enslave foreign workers from South Asia’ (actual things that have happened to people I know), but I get what you mean about the day to day / making a living stuff. |
Gregory's Server
For immigrants who are immigrants not by choice, their life choices are often shaped by western powers’ military and foreign policy decisions, sometimes having a home that isn’t perfect is the best that they can do.
That’s assuming people want to come to the ‘bastion of freedom’ that the U.S. believes it is, when no one really believes that anymore. (I would say the ‘migrants at the southern border’ are also doing it out of desperation for relative stability, not ‘freedom’)