Hunker down or abandon ship? Musings on the American dystopian nightmare

 

Olive trees in Nyons

Fourteen years ago, in a post here about living in San Miguel de Allende, I began with this quotation:

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” 
                                                                                                                                                    ― James Thurber

At the time, what we were running from included scary health insurance and care costs (as pre-Obamacare retirees) and the unaffordable cost of living in any of the places in the U.S. that seemed viable to us. And what we were running to was an affordable, culturally rich life in a gorgeous colonial city in the highlands of Mexico. 

In retrospect we really ought to have been much clearer on the "running to" part. Not to say that we didn't already know Mexico much better than the majority of expats we've met, but we also never loved the place in the way that we do, for example,  France or Italy. The unceasing noise above all, but also the lack of basic infrastructure, rampant crime (with no recourse), major air pollution even in smaller cities, and lack of access to nature wore us down. While there's much to love about everyday life there (and we miss the food and healthcare access every single day. Mexico was never a place we wanted to live in full-time. 

Fast-forward to March, 2025 and we're certainly older - though the "wiser" part of the cliché is somewhat dubious. And like everyone else know we're feeling completely shell-shocked by the rapidity of America's descent into full-on kleptocratic idiocracy. 

I've never heard so many people we know expressing the desire to flee the U.S. for good - an impulse we both understand and share. But now more than ever it's important to circle back to the Thurber quote above and be quite clear about the "running to" part of things. And this is all the more true given that for anyone 60 or older it'd be prudent to plan on any move one makes as being one's final one, given the realities of both aging and time required to fully adapt to life in a new country. 

Options have certainly narrowed in the past 5 years. Income requirements for long-term residency visas  have increased dramatically in Mexico and Italy. Spain and Portugal have had it with both garden-variety tourists and (especially) digital nomads, and understandably so given that rents in places like Barcelona have gone up nearly 60% in 5 years, driven by rapid conversion of already-scarce housing stock into AirBnB's. 

There's also the matter of the rise of authoritarian rule and hatred of immigrants being a worldwide phenomenon. For example we dearly love France, but the rural villages in the South and Southwest we love to visit are overwhelmingly in favor of Marine Le Pen and have the same attitude towards Muslim immigrants as the MAGA crowd does about Mexicans. Closer to home, the only full democracies in the Americas are Canada and Costa Rica (democracy index). Living as an expat in Mexico for five years it used to amuse us greatly when we heard newbie expats crowing about freedom there, blithely unaware that (as one seasoned expat friend puts it) "the fact that a country with no rule of law that's essentially run by narcos functions as well as it does on a daily basis is proof of the infinite goodness of the Mexican people."

Lake Chapala

Another consideration which unfortunately is often ignored until it's too late by prospective and actual expats is health insurance and health care costs and availability. Costa Rica and Panama have good national health care systems as well as retiree-friendly visa policies but few people seem to last even 5 years living in those countries, perhaps because culturally and culinarily they're about as bland as the American midwest. In México you'd better have the means to self-insure if you're in your mid-60's or older, as private insurance is prohibitively expensive. That means having liquid assets of at least $100K per person in the event of something serious (major car accident, heart attack, cancer). And that's in addition to having the income and/or assets required for a long-term residency visa, which for 2025 are  US$7,100 of monthly income or a total balance of around US$280,000 in savings/investment account(s). Long gone are the days of heading south-of--the-border to live on just your Social Security check (assuming of course that DOGE geniuses don't stop those checks from showing up altogether).Italy has much more accessible health care but their new residency visa requirements include a minimum of 31,000 euros in proven monthly income for a single person (38,000 for a couple) and no amount of assets will be accepted as a substitute.  

France of course has one of the world's best healthcare systems and long-term residents can participate in it after a few months. The savings on doing so along with rents that (outside of Paris, of course) are around 40% cheaper than typical big-city U.S. rents as well as superb public transportation explain why cost of living in much of the country is significantly less than in much of the U.S. The daunting thing, at least from our perspective, is that even after becoming fluent in French (a tall order but absolutely essential-there are no expat "bubbles" where you can skate by with English and a few French phrases) you'll be quite isolated unless you can afford to live in a city with a large expat population and have the means to both return home and travel within Europe. 

Portugal and Spain are a bit easier visa and cost-of-living wise but as already mentioned are tourist weary. For our tastes, lovely as they are in many ways, there's just not enough, culturally or culinarily, to motivate us to want to live there. A lot of the mania about Portugal in particular reminds me of similar surges in interest (promoted by International Living and others with real estate axes to grind) in Costa Rica, then Panama, then Ecuador, all of which were driven pretty much entirely by "you can live your American life for less" promotion rather than any love for the countries themselves. No wonder that so many folks who make those moves end up back in the U.S. once the realities of missing family and friends and the harsher reality of badly needing Medicare kick in. 

I haven't mentioned Asia because for us as for pretty much everyone else we know dealing with tropical heat and humidity year-round rules it out. Throw in the enormous challenges of learning languages like Thai or Vietnamese, the fundamentally insular and indeed often xenophobic nature of the cultures, and the huge distances (geographical and cultural) from everything familiar and it's no wonder that every expat we've met who's made it long term there married into the culture. 

Of course my perspective on all of this stuff is driven by age more than anything else. If I were in my 20's, 30's or 40's right now I'd be doing everything I could to get a job and make a life in a country I loved in Europe or Australasia. But as things stand it seems like the most viable option is to either live in a deep-blue state (or in our case, a blue pocket in a deep red state), support the resistance in every way we can think of, increase our forest-bathing time while drastically limiting our news consumption and in general lavish care on things we can influence if not control on a local and regional scale.