For People Planning To Get Outta Here: Some Pointers from Someone Who’s Migrated Internationally a Few Times
So Trump’s in power and you’d rather not be there while he runs the country into Great Depression 2.0. Or you’d rather Exit from Brexit. Or you don’t want to be in a world where Pauline Hanson is back in office. So hey! May as well hop to another country, right?
I don’t blame you. I’ve migrated twice (and then twice back) largely to avoid similar socio-political conflict and so I could live out my queer artsy self in relative peace. I understand that me and anyone else being able to do so is a massive privilege which I am thankful for, and I am also cognizant of the millions of people who “migrate” as refugees, asylum seekers, or any other situation where a lot of typical visa protections and processes don’t apply.
Take this advice and adjust it to your personal situation — this will be very different depending on where you migrate to, where from, your citizenship, your occupation, SO MANY THINGS.
Start making 10-year lists of your travels, housing, jobs, and possibly other things.
A lot of permanent residency applications (and some tourist visa applications) require this information from you. They’re looking for the last ten years of every international trip you’ve made (count every border crossing), every address you’ve lived in, every job you’ve had, and other information based on the country (Australia for example asks for a list of academic publications). The bare minimum:
- Travel: Dates from & to, city & country, length of stay, purpose of travel
- Housing: Dates from & to, full address inc city & country
- Jobs: Dates from & to, job title, brief job description, company, city & country
Get your paperwork in order!
There is a ridiculous amount of paperwork involved in migrating to a new place, whether temporarily or permanently — even more so if you hold a passport from a “High-Risk” (code for Global South/non-White) country. Here’s some of the types of paperwork you may need:
- The aforementioned 10-year histories
- Family trees
- Financial documents — bank statements, loans, stocks, investments, assets, tax documents
- Diplomas and transcripts
- Payslips and job offer letters
- Medical reports
- Support letters from family, friends, supervisors, administrators
- Police clearances from everywhere you’ve ever lived in for at least a year
- Resumes
- An endless array that will only grow as time goes on
Check your visa requirements! They’ll tell you more about what you need for your particular visa. My personal philosophy is “the more paperwork, the better”.
You may not be eligible for credit or loans in your new country immediately.
Despite being in Australia off and on for 10 years, I only became eligible for credit cards when my PR was granted in 2014 (and even then they’ll only give me one if I land a job). In the United States, as an international student, I wasn’t eligible for a credit score. This had some repercussions — my access to finances was limited to cash, and some things became slightly more expensive as a result. If you can secure credit from your home country beforehand, do so.
Consider the (Invisible) Immigrant Tax: everything becomes more expensive and cheaper options are inaccessible.
I mentioned above that my lack of a credit score in the US made things expensive — for instance, some places I’d looked to for housing wanted me to pay a double deposit, and I wasn’t able to access affordable housing due to my residency status. In Australia, as an international student and then as a bridging visa holder, university study was set at around 4x the domestic students’ fees, and I was ineligible for HECS/HELP, loans, or most scholarships. Even on a bridging visa, I was ineligible for government funding, including most of the arts funding that my fellow artists took for granted or flood relief money after my apartment was affected by the 2011 Brisbane floods.
Work visas — and jobs in general — are not easy to obtain.
This is especially true if you work in a non-STEM field (such as most of the Creative Industries) or are not of the dominant race of the country you’re moving to, but it’s pretty tough across the board. Many work visas have very arcane requirements about application dates and the types of jobs that can sponsor visas: the American H1-B, for example, requires jobs that are about 3 years in length and you can only apply at a certain time of year. Meanwhile Australia’s list of Skilled Occupations has become very, very short, and getting a job on a bridging visa is pretty much hell on earth.
If you manage to get into your new country by other means, job-hunting will still be a pain — some places privilege local experience qualifications over all else (my American MFA is useless here in Australia for academic work, for example) and there’s generally been a push towards hiring local people regardless of industry. Even supposedly menial jobs like waitressing can be difficult to obtain especially for certain demographics.
You may not have access to state health care immediately.
I struck really, really lucky with Obamacare while in Oakland; as a sanctuary city, Oakland didn’t take my visa status into account while signing me up for HealthPAC, which then got grandfathered into Medi-Cal. Because of this, I got my psych meds free for over a year, as well as free wisdom teeth extraction and free medical services overall. If it wasn’t for Obamacare, I would be stuck with my completely crappy student health insurance, which denied payments for my psychiatrist visit due to “pre-existing conditions” and retroactively decided to charge me for visits they used to cover.
The one saving grace I had with the Australian bridging visa was that I was immediately eligible for Medicare — which, thank fucking God. It wasn’t as good as HealthPAC in some respects (dental isn’t covered and I still had to pay for my meds) but it was a life-saver.
Your ability to get involved in political action may be compromised.
It took me a long time to be comfortable attending a protest in Australia, because I felt like it would contravene my visas and get me kicked out. Turns out that wasn’t the case, so I’ve been to a few and even run one myself. In the US I didn’t even dare show up to one (asides from a #MyNameIs protest at Facebook HQ and a Slutwalk) because the stakes were higher, especially for someone from my background.
Your acceptable political risk is up to you. Being detained or jailed for participating in a political action is a huge human rights violation, and it may result in you being thrown out of the country without right to return. In some places social media and digital media is tracked or blocked (Malaysians can’t read this because Medium is blocked there for the most part), so be careful about what you say. Consider other means of helping that don’t put you in the spotlight — donating money or supplies, caring for others working on the front lines, sharing information and signal-boosting.
Culture shock is a hell of a thing — even if you’re going to a culture that is familiar to you.
I had spent a summer at an artists’ residency in San Francisco and fell in love, so I plotted and planned to live there longer. When I returned the next year for my MFA, I found the first month so challenging that I nearly regretted my decision. It was the small things that got to me — a persistent sleep-depriving cough and the stress to find a doctor, having to navigate new public transport routes, getting all kinds of affairs in order. Other people I know — especially other international students — were falling ill, dealing with housing problems, and were stressed out in many ways beyond their education.
Just because it’s your favourite city ever doesn’t mean it won’t be rough when you try to settle in: adjustment is hard, especially when moving internationally. A friend gave me some valuable insight: it took them a year for them to really adjust to their new city, so maybe I should give myself a year before I think about bailing. Thankfully even before that first year was up I managed to find some support and strength in town, and the rest of my time in the Bay Area (save for some rough but surmountable parts) was pretty much a blast.
Making friends can be hard — but you’ll find them.
Moving sucks. One part of moving that’s especially terrible is finding social circles; you may be in a city or situation where most people already know each other and aren’t that friendly to newcomers. I’ve definitely faced a lot of loneliness in my first few months of moving anywhere.
That being said, I now have a handful of Bestest Friends Ever scattered across the world — some of which I only really got to know quite some time after I’d moved to that city. I’ve also had people reach out to me and actively seek me out for company here, which I really appreciate. There’s a lot of opportunities to meet people, and sometimes the most surprising and unexpected of people are the most welcoming.
Migrating is hard — harder than you anticipate.
You won’t be processed as a local for quite some time, so you’ll still be bound by foreigner rules— or maybe another set of rules specifically pertaining to migrants — for some time. Xenophobia permeates the world right now and you may end up being a target. There are a lot of logistical, safety, financial, emotional, social, and other issues that pop up when migrating — some of which you wouldn’t know until you face it directly.
Should you not migrate then? I wouldn’t say that. I know migrating has been a huge help for me for so many ways, including finding safer spaces for people like me. Sometimes you can’t stay and fight, for whatever reason — sometimes you’re much more useful on the outside, building bridges, sharing information. Sometimes you gotta take care of yourself first.
Just consider all the costs and factors that go into migrating — opportunity cost, financial cost, sanity cost. Be as informed as you can be before moving, including how your first year or so as an immigrant non-citizen will function. And be prepared — the more paperwork you have, the better.
Good luck. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
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