As a matter of law, every political crisis in the United States triggers a wave of Americans desperate to emigrate to New Zealand. Unsuspecting liberals are flooding online forums with polls, crowding out emigrant social media groups and leading immigration websites to the brink of crash.
“Are you happy to live in New Zealand?” I am a 27 year old man. I want to settle in Canada or New Zealand. NZ is like a peaceful paradise in the corner of the world, ”reads one longing survey.
“Trying to convince my friends that we should all relocate to New Zealand and live in Hobbit houses,” said a social media user – one of hundreds to tweet the sentence when the Supreme Court announced its decision to remove the right of American women to abortion.
“So: are we all moving to New Zealand? Hobbits? Sheep? Access to basic human rights? “Asks another.
“The time‘ I want to move to New Zealand ’from the news cycle,” says a third.
The phenomenon has become regular to predictability. In the days after Trump’s election, visits to the country’s immigration website increased by nearly 2,500%, and the number of immigrants from the United States increased 65% a year later. Following the Supreme Court decision, U.S. visits to immigration sites quadrupled to 77,000, local social media emigration groups fended off a wave of candidates, and local health recruiting agencies reported an increase in surveys of U.S. medical personnel.
For most, “I’m moving to New Zealand” remains an expression of frustration, rather than a life plan. But what about those who follow? Many of those Americans who ran away after the Trump election have now spent several years in the country – and life in a liberal paradise, it seems, is not without its own problems.
‘I was not prepared for life without Amazon Prime’
“Surely, the main thing I’ve been surprised at is how hard it is to find good Mexican food,” says Hawaiian creative director Chad Kukahiko. In a Facebook group for U.S. expatriates that Kukahiko helps take care of, “that’s like issue number one,” he says, with desperate members circulating a common spreadsheet of passable restaurants.
“I wasn’t ready for life without Amazon Prime,” laughs Madeline Nash, a Texan who made the move with her family in 2018. To see also : Democrats lobby for high-tech immigration reforms in the Innovation Act before Congress. “What’s a total first world problem, but just the access to goods and consumerism here … It did “I really realize that not everything was readily available at all times.”
Both count themselves among the wave that made the move after Trump took power. “We joked that on the night of the 2016 election, we were some of the people who crashed New Zealand’s immigration website – besides we actually experienced it,” Nash says.
For Kukahiko, Donald Trump’s 2016 election left him feeling disgusted – and worried that the country was on a sad trajectory to conflict. “For me it was visceral,” he says. “I was so shocked when more than 60 million people voted for this.” He was impressed by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, he says, which – especially after the shooting of the Christchurch mosque – seemed like Trump’s antithesis. He and his wife weighed in on Norway, but Aotearoa’s warmer weather sealed the deal.
For the Nash family, the decision to leave the United States came when their son turned five, and began school tours.
“We went to our local elementary school, and they spent 20 minutes of the 60-minute tour on their active shooter protocol. My husband and I just looked at each other. We were like: there has to be a better way to do that.” That November, the Nash family put in paperwork for New Zealand visas. “Sight unseen,” Nash says. “We’ve actually never been here before.”
‘We can’t ever imagine going back’
For some immigrants, New Zealand’s own social problems may come as a surprise. Read also : Joint statement on the situation in Libya – United States Department of State. In online discussion forums, expatriates note some of the disadvantages: housing crisis, low wages, painful gas prices and lack of high-quality dill pickles.
“The accommodations were something we were aware of – but didn’t really deepen until we started looking for our first rental,” Nash says. “There were a few houses we went into that I felt I needed a hazmat suit to be.”
“I was surprised that there are bands,” Kukahiko says. “But then I met a bunch of them and I was surprised they were so friendly and normal.”
For the most part, however, the country lived up to their hopes. The Nash family initially promised themselves that they would give it a two-year probationary period. “When two years came and went, we were like – we can’t imagine ever coming back,” Nash says.
Even the sting of losing the same-day delivery has softened into appreciation, she says for a “much less stressful,‘ Keeping Up with the Joneses ’lifestyle”.
Most of the cymbals are magnified by more consistent differences: free treatment, gun control, a safer place for children. “We had our baby and at no stage along the way someone gave me a $ 10,000 bill,” says Kukahiko. “I’m still emotionally thinking about it.”
“Then the lack of guns everywhere. The fact that he won’t have to learn nursery rhymes … in the U.S., kids of friends have to learn little nursery rhymes that have mnemonics that remind them what to do in the case of an active shooter, ”he says.“ No way my kid will do that. . “
“It’s not perfect. I know it’s not perfect. I know it’s not, ”says Kukahiko. “But I hear the things my friends here complain about and I’m like,‘ Oh, darling. That’s wonderful. ”
