CW: Ableism
Following last week’s election, tens of thousands of Americans are looking into moving out of the country. On Tuesday, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, to serve his second term.
In the hours following the election, more than 30,000 people visited the website Expatsi, a travel company that provides trips to help Americans move abroad. “We’re getting more than a month’s worth of site traffic today—already almost more than we got in all of 2022,” said Jen Barnett, co-founder of Expatsi, in an email to CNBC Make It on Wednesday. “We’ve also booked more than 100 new clients since last night.” “They want out, fast. Preferably before inauguration,” she added.
LaVerne Collins, 65, was in Portugal on a trip with Expatsi when she learned about the presidential election results. She voted early for Vice President Kamala Harris in Greensboro, North Carolina, but was already making arrangements to move abroad if Harris did not win. Collins, a licensed professional counselor, visited Costa Rica for the first time in July as a potential relocation destination when she thought that Trump had a chance of serving another term.
“As an African American woman, my concerns about government stability and safety have heightened,” she tells CNBC Make It. “I recognized that depending on how this election would go, things could become even more unstable.” As a mental health practitioner, she wonders if she can spend her retirement years surrounded by American politics and media coverage of it.
Collins intends to leave the United States by January 2025. She wants to find “the space to experience peace and not be overwhelmed by either events or news coverage of events that potentially strike me as threatening.”
The top factors when it comes to picking a new home country for herself and her husband are political stability, cost of living, affordable health care, low rates of gun violence an easy transition for Americans, and a warm climate. However, she is concerned about Americans flooding into certain regions following the election results. “The exit is real,” she explains.
During Donald Trump’s first term in 2016, many people wanted to move to Canada. The immigration website crashed when the results were coming in. On election night, half of the 200,000 visitors to the site used IP addresses from the United States. The site received 17,000 visitors the previous week, with 10% coming from the United States.
For disabled people, immigration is challenging. They encounter systemic challenges. They can face discrimination, socioeconomic deprivation, and barriers to accessing the safety net.
However, little information is available on the frequency of disability and the characteristics of adult immigrants who are not elderly. 5.6 percent of nonelderly immigrants are disabled based on five-year estimates from the 2015 to 2019 American Community Survey.
In Canada, disabled people are seen as a burden on the country’s social systems. The Canada Immigration Act requires the country to reject applications for immigration from people who have any disease, disorder, disability, or other health impairment that could pose a risk to public health or safety or that could reasonably be expected to place an undue burden on health or social services.
In Europe, Denmark has some of the strictest immigration policies. According to the Danish Institute for Human Rights equality office, if a disabled person is unable to meet language or full-time occupation requirements, the disabled person is placed in a less favorable position than other applicants. In 2020, 97.7% of dispensation applications were denied without explanation.
While some people are considering immigrating to another country, many people can’t. Disabled people should be able to have their needs met regardless of where they live.
Sources:
“Denmark: Impossible for Disabled People to Secure Citizenship.” European Website on Integration, 26 Nov. 2021, ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/news/denmark-impossible-disabled-people-secure-citizenship_en.
Echave , Paola, and Dulce Gonzalez. “Being an Immigrant with Disabilities.” Urban Institute, 25 Apr. 2022, http://www.urban.org/research/publication/being-immigrant-disabilities
Gajanan, Mahita. “Canada’s Immigration and Citizenship Website Has Crashed.” Fortune, Fortune Media Group Holdings, 9 Nov. 2016, fortune.com/2016/11/08/canadas-immigration-site-crashed-election/?iid=sr-link1.
“Immigration.” Immigration Council of Canadians with Disabilities, http://www.ccdonline.ca/en/socialpolicy/immigration. Accessed 25 May 2023.
Liu, Jennifer. “Americans Are Flocking to Expat Websites after the Election: ‘They Want out, Fast.’” CNBC, CNBC, 7 Nov. 2024, http://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/11/07/americans-flock-to-expat-websites-after-the-election-they-want-out-fast.html.
Worland, Justin. “Yes, Americans Really Did Crash Canada’s Immigration Site as Donald Trump Won.” Time, Time, 10 Nov. 2016, time.com/4566053/donald-trump-move-to-canada/.
I have been thinking of moving out of the country because of decades of poor- bashing that began with Ronald Reagan in 1979 and continued with Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and many more right-wing politicians and culminating with Trump in the last decade. Because I am seven- eighths Irish, I would be likely to go to Ireland if I do move. The problem is that I have Autism Spectrum Disorder, and my employment history is sketchy. I did a great deal of volunteer work from the late 1980s through 2017, but in our world volunteer work doesn’t “count.”
I had no idea some countries refused immigration status based on disability. It never even occurred to me.