I'm not specifically planning on leaving, but I recently went through the process of obtaining citizenship in Luxembourg by descent as a backup. I'm not sure yet what bad enough will look like, but when that happens I imagine I'll head over to whichever EU country hates Americans the least at that point.

My family and I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area (Marin) to Berlin in the summer of 2021. My wife and I had long wanted to move to Europe, and the drought/fire situation gave us a good reason. Plus, I had a fantastic job offer.

tl;dr: Germany was harder than expected. The language and culture barrier is real. Also, the job went sideways quickly. We moved to London in the summer of 2022, which is where I wanted to be all along.

I was surprised by how difficult it was to acclimate in England, despite knowing the language and being somewhat comfortable with the culture. It wasn’t as challenging as Berlin, but it still took me two or three years to feel stable and more assured in most situations.

In retrospect, that’s probably how long it took for me to feel the same way when I first moved to SF from my midwestern US hometown. Perhaps it’s always a similar adjustment. The only difference is whether you’re playing in cheat mode with the language and culture.

fwiw, I’ve only been called out as a foreigner once, although every time I fill out a government form, I have to list my ethnicity as “White (other).”

Most of America’s problems would be solved if everyone had to experience what it feels like to be an immigrant (or even a tourist!). I have nothing but my deepest respect and empathy for anyone who takes on the challenge.

I'm an expat who moved north 20 years ago, but my family also moves to Germany for extended periods every 5 years or so, and we were there on a residence permit a year ago.

Whys: Easy on just about every level. Health care? So much better. Schools? Way better than the U.S. And it's not so much that my health care in the U.S. was bad (I had "cadillac" plans) or that I would have had to put my child in a sub-par school. It's the fact that those differences exist and are WAY worse now even than when I was a kid. There's a higher level of well-being from just from being in a country where I know everyone has access to a decent base level of health care and education. (Perfect? No. Better? Yes.) And as my kid looks at universities, it's still amazing to me how here in Canada, all the major public universities are...very good, on a global scale. The average level matters if you're trying to have a healthy society.

Hows: Harder. Even for me, having lived in Germany for 5 years as a child / young adult and speaking the language fairly fluently, moving there with a young elementary school student (later, a high school student) threw me for a loop at every turn. I could give you a laundry list of differences, from how Germans list apartments (rooms, not bedrooms, and often without anything in the kitchen room but electrical and water hookups), how long landlords expect tenants to stay (forever), the entire school system (they segregate kids on ability very young and don't tolerate online learning / homeschooling), knowledge of how to work the system when you can't get a residency permit application appointment through the online system, and on and on.

The people I know who've left the U.S. in the last 5 years who've been successful have been people who already had an interest in the country, knew the culture and language at least somewhat, and wanted to be there for reasons other than "it's not the U.S. and it's easy to get into, cheaper, and a lot of Americans live there".

And on the topic of English-speaking countries, I think many Americans don't get that other English-speaking countries are not the U.S. Even Canada is at its core different than the U.S., culturally. A relative of mine moved to the UK recently and has learned that the basics of life are very different -- education, home buying, taxation, etc. And neither exactly welcomes immigrants right now.

Curiosity and an interest in the country you're moving to will help weather these things, of course.