A growing number of Americans are getting ready to emigrate as former President Donald Trump zig-zags back toward the White House, says an American journalist living in central Italy.
“If Trump is reelected, Americans are planning to flee in droves,” Business Insider author Paul Starobin said as he described the chatter on a Facebook group for U.S emigrants in Italy:
From a woman in Montana who was planning to move to Tuscany: “Yes, it’s true! I bought a hilltop village home … for a song compared to US prices. Don’t want to be in US anymore. It’s expensive and sick of all the political crap and shootings.”
From a woman in Texas: “An insurrection by a narcissist who couldn’t accept election loss combined with his gun and abortion policies made moving more of a necessity than just a dream.”
The author is a veteran journalist, so he is skeptical of his social peers’ doomsday talk:
Every four years, as Americans gird themselves to choose a president, there’s talk, mainly among Democrats, of leaving the country. I’m off for Canada if unacceptable candidate X wins! And every four years, the promised exodus fails to materialize. It’s mostly just therapeutic venting.
But this time is different, in part because media outlets read by comfortable Americans are sounding the alarm about Trump’s approach, he said:
This time is different.
The alarm over Trump’s potential triumph in November is far starker than the fears stoked by past presidents. “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” a recent Washington Post headline warned. The Atlantic devoted an entire issue to the authoritarian horrors in store for America “If Trump Wins.”
The Atlantic‘s anti-Trump articles are hair-raising for people who choose to have faith in progressivism.
“Trump has signaled that in a second presidential term, he would further escalate his war on blue America,” wrote pro-migration author Ron Brownstein in the January/February issue.
“Returning Trump to the presidency would reopen wounds that have barely healed in the [illegal migrant] communities he has said he would target immediately,” fretted author Caitlin Dickerson.
“He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging [transgender] identities,” worried Spencer Kornhaber. “He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.”
Progressives at major media outlets will twist the anti-Trump message far above 11 during the next few months.
But the author — who owns an apartment in Italy – also admits that some of the migrants are being driven by poverty amid President Joe Biden’s migration-fuelled version of crony capitalism:
Trump is far from the only reason Americans are eyeing the exits. That’s true: Housing prices in America are high … Fewer and fewer Americans, pollsters have found, believe “the American Dream — that if you work hard you’ll get ahead — still holds true.” In 2012, it was 53%. By October 2023, it was down to 36%.
A poverty-caused exodus is ironic because many of the migrants voted for Biden’s migration policies, which spiked housing costs and reduced white-collar salaries.
The fading prosperity of America’s underemployed and underpaid college-graduate population is also driving more Americans to low-rent, low-cost nations. In October 2023, CNBC.com reported on the migration of economically precarious and stressed-out professionals to cheaper lodgings in Mexico:
CNBC Make It spoke with several Americans living in Mexico City who told us the area is cheaper, offers a more laid-back lifestyle, and is rich in culture and community. And while Mexico suffers significantly higher crime rates than the U.S., some Black Americans say the region can feel safer and more inclusive.
CNBC interviewed an unmarried teacher from Texas who fled a stressful life in the increasingly diverse state:
Adalia Aborisade, 48, moved to Mexico City in 2017 after teaching social studies, geography and history in Texas public schools for 19 years. “The amount of peace and ease that I have in this life — I would not trade that for the world,” Aborisade says.
…
“The American dream is a sham. Because I had the house, the cars, the kids. I did all of that, but even achieving those things, it still seemed like it wasn’t enough,” Aborisade says. “I felt like in that moment [of my life] I was cratering under the weight of all of the expectations that were on me as a teacher.”
The displacement of disconnected, stressed, economically precarious Americans is the flip side of the nation’s economic policy, which favors the relentless growth of Wall Street. That growth is fed by the federal strategy of extraction migration, which shifts family wages and workplace investment toward Wall Street, real estate, coastal states, and government.
The ruthless economic policy is very unpopular among Americans, in part because it also diverts politicians’ focus away from American communities and the “deaths of despair” among discarded Americans.
The exodus of Americans to southern France, Italy, and other low-birthrate countries can be economically good for many ancient towns and villages.
Those rural communities are being suddenly depopulated by contraceptive technology, very low birthrates, government paralysis, and the technology-driven centralization of business and jobs in large urban districts.
Yet foreigners in other countries are also getting stressed out by the arrival of American outsiders in their vibrant communities, CNBC reported from Mexico City:
Some [Mexico City] locals, though, say this rush of [American] expatriates is threatening to change the fabric of the city. Rent prices are going up, short-term rentals are proliferating and Mexicans are being displaced by the more prosperous newcomers. These days on a walk through some popular neighborhoods, you may hear more English spoken than Spanish, and see cafes crowded with remote workers on laptops.
…
“Basically what happens is kind of a butterfly effect where … people from out of the country come and establish in the nicer areas or the nicer parts of our city, and then we are forced to go out,” [Mexican architect Leticia] Lozano says.
“There are a lot of people who [joke] we need a visa to go to those [busy] neighborhoods,” Mexican Anais Martinez told CNBC. “I’ve heard people saying, ‘Oh, now the dogs speak English.’”
