Ahead of election day, American Gabi Mayers has booked a flight to London.
She loves the United States. A lot. But she says life is hard enough without the specter of surging gun sales, extremists plotting to abduct elected officials, and brawls in Times Square amid a caravan of maskless Donald Trump supporters flouting social distancing measures. If Trump wins a second term on Tuesday, that will be the final straw.
“All I’ve ever wanted to do is just be happy, and have peace of mind. And I’m not able to do that in this country,” said Mayers, a 25-year-old producer in New York City.
Mayers intends to leave for around a month and a half to begin with, and she’s not the only one with that instinct. Faced with a country that is seemingly losing its democratic ideals, , some anxious Americans are wrestling with the question of whether to flee.
“Since Donald Trump was elected president, there are times when I now feel unsafe in this country in a very real way,” said Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender activist, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and professor at Barnard College.
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“Strangers come up to me on the street and threaten me, and I’m looking at a government that has done everything it can to demean the humanity of people like me.”
Although Boylan was mostly indulging a fantasy when she began her research into where she could actually go, the notion sounds less like a joke over time.
“I’m not sure that I can take another four years of this,” said Boylan, who penned one of her columns on how a “generation of Americans” is experiencing the urge to “get the hell out” of the US.
“I’m far from alone in that,” she said.
After a September presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden that was dubbed a national humiliation, surging Google searches hinted at panic among people looking for answers about how to move to Canada or New Zealand. But even as Americans start to plan their escape from Trumpland, they’re doing so with a great deal of guilt, heartache and astonishment.
“This seems like something new,” said Inez McGee, a retiree in California. She had never heard other people talk about leaving the US before, much less considered it herself – not even during the craziest days of Richard Nixon’s presidency, which ended in resignation.
Back in 2016, Inez, like many others, joked about getting out if Trump were elected. Most, like Inez, did not follow through with the idea.
Then came a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi rammed his car into anti-racist protesters, killing Heather Heyer. As anger and vitriol render the country almost unrecognizable, she’s now amenable to departing for years, should Trump win office again.
Her husband, Jim, meanwhile, feels conflicted about leaving behind family to quietly retire elsewhere.
“This is our country,” he said. “We don’t wanna give it up to people who are – who we feel are – misusing it.”
Trump is trailing Biden in national and key state polls, but polls have been wrong before. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million votes in 2016, but that doesn’t determine who becomes president.
“I did not want to be in America ruled by Donald Trump. It was that basic, and that clear,” said Audrey Edwards, author of American Runaway.
Edwards had started a life in Paris before the coronavirus pandemic. After returning to the US earlier this year, she got stranded stateside as countries, including France, banned most American visitors.
“If Trump is re-elected – and I really don’t think he will be – but if he is re-elected, we are in the nightmare of perhaps not being able to get out of here,” Edwards said.
Even aside from travel restrictions, expats still encounter serious limitations on where they can resettle long-term. Young people with means may be able to finagle their way out of the country through school, work or marriage. Well-off retirees could possibly forgo their healthcare coverage and their grandchildren for a new life in Latin America.
But “I would imagine for the vast, vast majority of Americans who may want to leave, it’s going to be virtually impossible to actually go to another country”, said Demetrios Papademetriou, a distinguished transatlantic fellow and president emeritus at the Migration Policy Institute.
Some Americans speculate online about whether they could win asylum abroad. But “it is impossible to win an asylum claim” just because Trump gets re-elected, Papademetriou said.
Latoya Brown, who is from Alabama but living in Ghana, has been alarmed by chatter on social media, where users bemoan America’s sociopolitical climate and talk about their plans to leave. She has written a book warning readers about the less romantic realities that await them if they do actually relocate to somewhere like west Africa.
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“I kind of safeguard myself,” Brown said. “But those that are coming here, they don’t know any better.”
Beverly Bartlett, a minister in New York City, looks up churches in Scotland – or how to emigrate to New Zealand and Canada – when she hears reports that Trump could still win the electoral college.
But at least for now, she says she’s trying to live by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s example.
The German theologian, who considered seeking refuge in the US during the second world war, instead returned to Germany as part of the resistance and was later executed.
“As much as I might want to leave, it is a privilege to even be able to think about it,” Bartlett said. “It’s probably better to stay here and continue to fight it, knowing that most people can’t leave.”
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