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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Place To Relocate?
New submitter tsakas writes: "I am an IT researcher from southern Europe looking for a good place to relocate. Markets are pulling the teeth out of the strong European countries by destroying the south. The U.S. is in debt and there is no way of telling how long this can go on. China and India are on the rise. Brazil and Australia are looking good. The question: Which city would you choose to go and start a family if you were to stay there for a) 5, b) 10 and c) 20 years?"
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why are you relocating? if you fear for the wellbeing of your family you should know the health insurance for american workers is generally inferior to that of many european nations especially when considering their family coverage. The public education is routinely inferior as well, and 40 hours per week for tech workers is conservative in many cases. You arent going to see much more than 1-2 weeks of vacation in the first year in the states, and several of the southern states are sadly virulently xenophobic.
can you clarify on what you mean by markets pulling the teeth out of strong european countries? You make it seem like you've simply become jaded by a spate of recent financial reforms. Strong Europeans are the backbone of strong European countries, so if you and others leave it simply leaves more room to turn the EU into a libertarian dystopia.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Also FYI, be good at what you do and no financial crisis can hurt you.
History tells a different story.
Being good at what you do alone will not insulate you from financial crisis's, you also have to make good business decisions.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
It's funny how people from Western countries with ridiculously lax immigration procedures go abroad, expecting every country to be just like their own. They are shocked, shocked to find out that a visa is a sovereign act of a nation and it is that country's choice to set the rules.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The US's major creditor is itself. Foreign investment accounts for only 32% of US debt. China just happens to be the largest single foreign owner, but their ownership of total US debt is only about $1.2 Trillion or about 11% of total debt.
You are correct though, China's economy is very dependent upon the US and they do not have enough control, power, influence, etc, to crash the US economy.
I hail from Australia, and always felt that I was in a very small country with limited opportunities, despite everything going for it. Probably a fantastic country to raise kids or retire, but the economy isn't as big, and there aren't as many opportunities as, say, the US or UK.
I wanted out, because I wanted to swim in a bigger pond. It was a tossup between the US and the UK, and because I had an easy visa (something you might like to consider), I just went to London. The UK has big social problems (even more than the US, it has a huge, feral, festering underclass, and I get the impression that the UK is a *BAD* place to be down on your luck), but if you're good at what you do, you can probably afford to live in a good areas and send your kids to decent schools and generally stay away from all the shit. London is a huge, bustling, dynamic place that's fairly close by, and there's something here for just about everyone (unless you're poor, of course).
You're southern European, as you say, so don't forget that you have EU treaty rights. There are plenty of options for relocation within Europe.
That said, you wouldn't want to retire here. I certainly don't plan on sticking around past retirement.
If by "Europe" is doing badly you must surely mean the Eurozone. Unemployment in Norway/Sweden/even formerly bankrupt Iceland is very good. If you're having kids, the 2 months mandatory paternity leave in Sweden would be nice. You'd get to spend time with your kids and not have to work all the time and it allows your spouse to keep a career too. The governments themselves are very stable with the lowest levels of corruption in the world (if only Greece could say the same!), allowing the high tax rate to give you a decent rate of return on services you receive.
In short, it's the southern European welfare state on steroids but done responsibly.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The US - still the best place to live
That's simply not true. The best places to live are canada, australia or northern europe.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities or http://money.msn.com/family-money/the-worlds-15-best-places-to-live/ etc.
For a southern european the best (and by far easiest) bet is simply northern europe, including germany, but preferably somewhere not in the euro zone. Even somewhere that is indexed to the euro, but not on the euro.
The US can be lucrative if you're in IT. But it has unnecessarily long work hours, bad health care, and a persistent civil rights and racism problem that aren't worth dealing with if you can avoid it. Not that europe doesn't have racism problems too, but they're different than in the US, so why deal with the US problem at all? If you go to the US and have kids you have to worry about the education they'll get, how you'll pay for post secondary etc. In a civilized country those are problems, but at 1/10th the magnitude, so why would you deal with it? Healthcare is the same sort of problem. If you're going to the US you may as well talk about brazil, russia, china, there are all very lucrative opportunities but you can also end up really screwed if the police or government or just some random local asshole decides they want rid of you.
If you're seriously worried about politics then the US and UK in particular are bad places to be. Both have political parties (the conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US) pushing thoroughly discredited economic policies on their own country, and that again, is just not worth dealing with. It's not that their problems aren't solvable, it's that the people in charge are deliberately not solving them. Germany is in the same boat, but their discredited policies are fucking over the rest of europe, rather than themselves.
Failing a european solution, which from an immigration perspective is by far the easiest, your second choice is probably canada. Australia is probably more lucrative, and you don't have to worry about being dragged down by the americans the way we do in canada, or buried in our own internal political stupidity (the french separatists in quebec, the Alberta-ontario split on oil vs manufacturing etc.) but canada is much closer to europe physically, which makes going home a lot less painful.
Then it's a matter of immigration. I'm not 100% sure on australia, but I would think they have the same thing as everywhere else, if you have paper IT skills it's easier to get immigration, at which point any of canada, australia, new zealand all work reasonably well.
The problem is the questioner is an "IT Researcher". It's hard to know what exactly that means. Is that a PhD in some IT field looking for a faculty position? Then basically anywhere you can find a job is the right answer, because faculty positions are decent everywhere. If you're looking for private sector research that's much harder, because it depends what you can do exactly.
It's not that there aren't great opportunities in second and 3rd world countries, there are, but if you don't know your way around the local system it's very hard to capitalize on those without a lot of money to start with. If you're just looking for a job to settle your life down with, then go somewhere with a high per capita income, decent vacation time, decent education and decent healthcare (on which the US gets 1/4, canada australia 3/4 and northern europe 4/4).
It is a huge Deal!
No, really, it's not. Saying it's a huge deal doesn't make it a huge deal.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/pages/textview.aspx?data=yield
Your debt is at negative interest rates for anything past 10 year notes. 16 trillion dollars is spread across 330 million people.
What matters isn't how much debt you have. That sounds strange, but hear me out. If you owed me 1 million dollars but I was charging you 1% interest a year (10k/year) you could probably manage. If you owed me 100k at 10% interest a year the net cost is the same. So then the issue with the US is whether or not your interest rates are going to magically spike (which despite all the predictions they haven't), and if they do whether or not you can still pay the debt off. Which you can.
The US debt problem is *entirely* an artificial political construction. Right now you should be borrowing several hundred billion dollars a year more to fund job creation (in this case in particular probably infrastructure rebuilding) so you can get the economy back to growing. Paying people unemployment when you could pay them to do work is simply stupid. Leaving people unemployed when there is work that needs to be done and you can borrow money at negative interest rates to pay them to do it is willful damage to the economy.
The way out of any debt problem for a government once the economy picks back up (which is different from a person) is to manage the money supply to keep interest rates low relative to nominal GDP growth (nominal GDP grows with inflation, productivity and population), and then make sure you have sensible tax revenue, especially when the economy is doing well. The US has a nominal GDP growth rate of 5% a year over the last 60 or so years (and remember the government can tweak that number itself with inflation and immigration), so even running a 4% of GDP deficit (which right now would be about 640 billion dollars) is still shrinking the relative size of the debt, which is all that matters.
You've never been to Australia, mate. Better quality of life. EU style healthcare so you don't lose your life savings when some doctor surprises you with his out-of-network facility or lab fees. If you get cancer and are too weak to work you don't lose your health coverage, so there's at least some chance of continuing medical treatment undisrupted to possibly beat your disease or at least leave your kids an inheritance. Better work-life balance, longer vacations, less expensive to fly from Oz to hundreds of tropical destinations. A road trip could take you to any type of landscape you prefer (though mostly desert in the interior, but no worse than the American West).
Australia doesn't have as many "enemies" as America, so traveling with an Aussie passport is generally safer, and it isn't as likely to get nuked off the planet in WW3. Only problem is so many people want to move to Australia that immigration is tight. But if you're under 40 and have technical or trade skills you'll probably get in. It helps to speak English like a native speaker, as well as if you come from a Commonwealth country. The Aussies, due to geography, have an advantage trading with China, India, and other nations in the Pacific Rim. Very little national debt, so economy is great, but trying hard to get more immigrants with high-tech skills. Lots of land in the interior, though water is in short supply, so sustainable agriculture for a growing population could be an issue in the future. If China ever seeks military expansion like Japan in WW2 then Australia could be a target for invasion, but what are the odds, right? China on the warpath wouldn't be good for anybody in the way, and the USA is more of a threat to China than Australia. All said, thousands of miles of ocean separating Australia from the rest of the world means that military threats can only come from heavily industrialized nations with substantial military forces. There is illegal immigration, but limited to boat people, so no porous border issues to worry about. Little to no terrorist threat to Aussie soil, though occaissionally Aussies can be targeted in hot zones if the terrorists can't find any Americans. Australia tends to be more "out of sight - out of mind" and generally not considered a threat to any other nations. Aussies also benefit from being a Commonwealth country, making future travel or immigration easier. Better social safety net for people down on their luck (though some abusers too lazy to work, so taxes are higher than the US). Relationship with indigenous people can be touchy at times due to abuses in the past, and some present-day conflicts over sacred sites, but Australian aborigines tend to be easy to get along with. Much less racism compared to KKK and Black Panthers in America. Murder rate is lower as well (4.2 in US vs. 1.0 in Australia, per UNODC). All in all its hard to imagine a much better place.