The American Emigrant questionnaire!
I'll go first: Married mom of two (+ pet) moved from DC 'burbs to Spain
A quick one today in which I enlist your help to launch the American Emigrant spotlight series. The idea is that every couple of months I will feature a standardized profile of an American emigrant that digs into their motivations for leaving the United States and their experience overseas.
The goal is to humanize the American emigration trend through stories that bring some of the data I’ve been sharing to life.
I’ll be basing these profiles on two anonymous surveys that I hope you can help me share:
The American Emigrant Questionnaire is a 15-question survey for Americans who have already moved abroad.
The Maybe American Emigrant Questionnaire, as the name suggests, is for Americans who are seriously considering leaving, but who haven’t made firm plans to leave just yet.
They should take just a few minutes. If you know anyone who fits these descriptions, please forward this to them! To help illustrate what this series will look like, I will go first:
Married mom of two (+ pet) moved from DC 'burbs to Spain
Date of move: April 2021
Age at time of move: 37
People joining me on the move: Husband, 22-month-old son, dog, baby on the way
Push Factors: There were a lot of them. I’m clearly still picking this all apart, but here’s what I know: My husband and I moved into what we thought would be our forever home in the suburbs of D.C. in October 2017. We had both been working as journalists in Turkey and moved back to the United States specifically to be closer to family when starting a family of our own. But we never seemed to get our feet under us.
My husband was laid off twice in 15 months — the first time when I was pregnant with our son and the second time when our son was just 11 months old, two months into the pandemic. I was freelancing for most of this time, writing magazine features, teaching a writing course at a D.C. prep school and putting out a weekly newsletter for HuffPost on a contract that ended the month before my son was born.
The layoffs didn’t faze my husband, who swiftly found new and better work. But I felt rattled by a sense of instability. New motherhood was the most vulnerable time in my life, and our career and financial uncertainty, however temporary, added layers of stress to my sleep-deprived days and nights, which I mainly spent struggling to breast feed. I fixated on the cost of everything, the lack of protection for workers, the weakness of our social safety net, the confusion of our healthcare system, the little time afforded to so many Americans to adjust to their new identities as parents. Yearning for added stability, I began looking for full-time work. When my son was about five months old, I made it to the final round of interviews for a job an hour away from our house and felt a rush of relief when I didn’t get it.
My husband, meanwhile, was entirely unconvinced that any job would fix the systemic brokenness he fixated on. Observing friends, neighbors and colleagues split off from their families at 7am, reconvene for a quick processed dinner followed by more emails and mindless TV, he asked himself, is this the pinnacle of success? Returning from years as a war correspondent, he chafed at what he saw as American decadence. He ruminated over American divisiveness, political posturing and virtue signaling, the brightness of the lights in the supermarket, society’s disconnection from nature.
Pull Factors: As we tried to diagnose the problem and talked in circles about potential solutions, I began to have increasingly serious conversations with an American colleague in Spain about what her life was like there. We had met the very month I moved to the United States and had been collaborating since then on a series of articles. By chance, we found out we were pregnant at about the same time and became new mothers just weeks apart. Comparing notes, I began to see Spain as a temporary solution — a place of stable and straightforward healthcare, affordable quality childcare and a community- and family-centric culture. I knew my husband would appreciate the fresh food and access to nature in southern Spain and the distance it would give him from the hostility cleaving American society.
Permanent move? The initial plan was to stay in Spain for two years while we hatched a better plan to make the U.S. work. But four years later we are still here, enjoying being part of a society that has given us so much more than we could have anticipated. We still have our eyes on the U.S., but continue to struggle with the same systemic problems we identified years ago, that are coming into clearer focus the more time we spend in a society that, by many measures, is simply healthier. This Substack project is part of an attempt to figure out our pathway forward.
Challenges you’ve faced abroad: Being so far from family, noticing a growing cultural gap between my children and me, inability to pursue certain career pathways from Spain, the complexity of feeling ties now to two places.
Immigrant or expat?: Definitely not expat. Having been one for years in Turkey, I’m confident that what I’m currently doing is in a different category. We do not live a foreigner bubble and instead are integrated into a local community. Our kids are beloved in the neighborhood and attend local schools. We all socialize almost exclusively with locals and in Spanish. Immigrants? While still living in limbo and uncommitted to staying here permanently, I might not go so far. But something surely in the middle.