With all the dismal news about America lately, my home, I’m starting to seriously look at where else to move.
Putting aside for now the difficulty of actually immigrating to some countries, I’m curious on the opinions of others (especially people living outside the U.S) on this.
What I’m looking for in a country is, I imagine, similar to many people. I’m trying to find somewhere that will exhibit:
- Low racism
- Low sexism
- Low LGBTQ-phobia
- Strong laws around food quality and safety
- Strong laws about environmental protection
- Strong laws against unethical corporate practices (monopoly, corruption, lobbying, etc)
- Strong laws for privacy
- Good treatment of mentally ill, homeless, and impoverished people
Those are the real important things. Of course the nice-to-haves are almost too obvious to be worth listing, low cost of living, strong art and cultural scene, nice environment, and so on.
My actual constraints that might really matter are that I only speak English (and maybe like A1-2 level German). It seems incredibly intimidating to try to find employment somewhere when I can hardly speak the language.
I know nowhere on Earth is perfect, just curious what people may have to suggest. I hope this question isn’t too selfish to ask here.
Im a migrant to Australia. It’s true Australia has loads of issues involving racism. That said I DO have the right to protest, and vote towards a better future. And I can, and do, get involved with my community to do what I can regarding those topics. Importantly though I can live in the country and not face racism daily nor often get treated differently because of the way I look.
Regardless I’m obviously going to take the word of the actual Chinese migrants I know of, and the people I know living in China, over strangers on the internet. You’re allowed to have your own opinions on it, I just don’t think it’s a great idea to hand wave the racism issues in China, particularly for people who are black or brown.
You are often permitted to stand around ineffectually or be in a parade that has no impact - though not always, of course. Once your action becomes actually disruptive to capital or related institutions, they lean on their own rules and the law to arrest, punish, expel, and/or deport those involved. As a migrant, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with this reality but avoid participation unless you are ready to accept those outcomes (and do not tell anyone your legal status, including me).
The only resistance allowed under liberalism is that which has no real impact on the greater schemes. Capitalist media tells fairy tales about how politics works, but they are falsehoods that whitewash history and try to make us complacent.
There is rarely much alignment between what you can vote for and what you actually want. Capitalist politics places emphasis on fights and reforms around problems that it itself creates and exacerbates, making you focus on undoing various injustices while doing nothing about the major ones. It provides the illusion of control and bastardizes the term, “democracy”, distilling it down to occasional votes for controlled parties and not rejecting the will and needs of the people. Again, your country is premised on genocide and the theft of the land and practices of indigenous Australians. You are participating in that, you are extolling the virtues of voting for people who engage in that theft and disposession to this day, like making indigenous Australians afraid of speaking to social workers lest the white supremacist institutions take away their children using anti-indigenous bias.
Ask yourself what control you have over various political parties’ positions, how they function, and why some parties enjoy popularity and favorable media coverage and others struggle and are wrongly vilified. Is it democracy in action?
It is of course good to be in community.
I think you are more likely just unfamiliar with what Australian white supremacy looks like because there is absolutely zero chance that you don’t encounter such people on a daily basis. Like I said, try following beauty standards associated with your ethnicity(ies) and engaging in disruptive action and you will immediately and viscerally learn what is often unstated but nevertheless present and impacting interactions. Or do the opposite and model whiteness and see what hapoens. Even just having a white sounding nane will consistently give you an advantage on job applications, including by people who say they are not racist. The racism is deep and pervasive, baked into the everyday.
You don’t have to take my word. Just go to China yourself. Assuming any amount of your stories are true, you should remember that you are negatively stereotyping 1.4 billion people based on a handful of accounts of people of unstated age who decided to leave the country. As an immigrant you should be familiar with the pressure to praise the country you move to and denigrate the one you came from. Immigrants in my country say absolute 100% bullshit things about the countries they came from. It seems to help them fit in. Particularly with white people. Also do not forget that immigrants are often a highly biased sample of the people from a given country. For example, in OECD countries, Indian immigrants are disproportionately upper caste and professionals forwarding petty bourgeois ideals. They will tell you absolute bullshit about conditions in India, they will be disproportionately Hindu supremacists, islamophobic, casteist, and praise light skin. You must dig deepee to understand a large and multifaceted country.
I haven’t hand-waved any racism, full stop.