Have you immigrated?

This is a room for the discussion of travel plans or experiences and the culture of places you have visited or plan to visit.
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Xenops
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Have you immigrated?

Postby Xenops » Sat Jul 09, 2022 10:34 am

Have you packed up your bags and moved to another country? Or have you seriously considered it, and but something got in the way?

I am considering moving to Europe, and I have read Cavesa's logs in depth, and I am starting to understand the difficulty of the task.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby jimmy » Sat Jul 09, 2022 11:48 am

I am gathering some information. my prepreference is freedom & money. Why do you consider Europea ? I do not have good predictions for these countries : All countries whose first and official mother tongue/language is English & All European Countries for next 10-20 years. This is just prediction.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby jimmy » Sat Jul 09, 2022 11:55 am

Xenops wrote: I am starting to understand the difficulty of the task.

it is really not an easy thing to decide to me too. Because here in Turkey I am official teacher , familiarised to a lifestyle and know almost every type of students.

all in alll, this existing position is not and also should not be my aim or target lifestyle.

I have very positive tone of predictions for Arab world and chinese locations (excluding singapore and somewhere like this area )
to me, a new design of new world might be constructed. do not be too much anxious, some new options will/might be available in my opinion. like new liberties (similar to european style,too)


however, we may face with very serious problems (like famine, wars).

when I try to convince myself to leave from here, I want to simplify the case like this:

we will eventually face with the death at the end. I have a very nice and sweet mother. She won't be able to see me for long times maybe. but with this, she will know that I live,though and I will know she lives too .) this is better case from death. also similarly, I remember some times in the past I had had almost nothing regarding money or economy. So ,the worse of the worst will be losing my existing money , but definitely I will have lost just my money. besides and conversely,I shall have option to meet new faces , use the language actively , learn a new language in a different style. etc.
Last edited by jimmy on Sat Jul 09, 2022 12:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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tiia
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby tiia » Sat Jul 09, 2022 12:07 pm

Xenops wrote:Have you packed up your bags and moved to another country? Or have you seriously considered it, and but something got in the way?

I am considering moving to Europe, and I have read Cavesa's logs in depth, and I am starting to understand the difficulty of the task.

Yes, I have. I had the idea quite long in mind, then first did an exchange in 2012/13 and moved to Finland after graduation in 2018. Luckily my job did not require any special recognition, so everything was relatively easy. When searching for a summer job from Germany, the only place that responded was my former guest university. They luckily gave me the place.
Although I had first thought of doing a year of practical training here and there and discover other countries as well, I realised that if I wanted to stay in Finland, I had to stay now. So after the end of the summer job I did some financial calculations, had to find another accomondation and searched for another job in my field. Surprisingly I sent only less than 10 applications until was invited to one interview and got the job. Being already in the region made it definitely much easier than applying from abroad. I'm still at the same company now btw.

I had a slightly different process from the norm when it came to registrating my right of residence, as I had not really planned to stay for more than three months when I arrived. So (almost) everything was first planned to fit into the three months a EU citizen can stay without the registration of the right of residence*, but then I had to do the registration process as soon as possible while not yet having a new job. However, I made very positive experiences with the staff there, giving me tips what kind of information I could still upload to hopefully get the application approved. (Like my first work contract and the transcript of records from my exchange.) In the end I could already upload my new work contract before they had their decision ready, so then the case was clear.
*I was, however, somehow temporarily registrated for tax reasons.

One thing that made the whole decision to move much easier for me in the sense of actually having the courage to try this, was having an emergency backup plan in case everything fails. That meant that I had asked my parents before even applying for the summerjob, whether they would be ok with me living at their place again for a short period of time, although I had been living on my own for the last 10 years. Just in case I would not find any place to stay etc.

I wrote about the process also in my log. (Just go to the end of the first post, I have put some bookmarks there to make navigation easier.)

You may also be interested in this thread I started at some point: Working in your L2

If you have any particular questions in mind, feel free to ask.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby galaxyrocker » Sat Jul 09, 2022 1:13 pm

Sorta. I moved to Ireland for university. I was originally on a leave of absence from my teaching job, but decided to try to stay here instead and switch careers so that I could stay in the country. Thankfully my masters allows me to do so.

Ireland has it somewhat easier than most places, as if you're a university graduate here you can stay for up to two years working any job on what they call the 'stay back visa'. The only problem is these two years don't count towards permanent residency requirements or citizenship requirements.
I'm also considering moving to France (I really need to decide, actually), which doesn't have a stayback scheme but you can stay one year working 60% of full-time hours while looking for a work visa. No sure how difficult it is or not to get visa issues situated out there though.

Really, the easiest way to probably immigrate is to use one of the countries that have a Golden Visa. Or, take the shortcut to Europe and go get Argentinean citizenship first. This is actually the quickest route to any EU citizenship except for marriage that I'm aware of. 2 years in Argentina, get citizenship, then you can get legal right of residence in Spain and it only takes two years there to get Spanish dual citizenship.

Overall,t he move to Ireland was fine, I had no issues with immigration or getting through it. The problem comes after university. I'm currently trying to find a job and it's been very hit or miss, mostly because of visa issues. Lots of automatic filters if you're not a permanent resident with right to work already. This is true even with the stay back scheme, and a lot of places won't even look at you until you've gotten the stay-back visa (which won't be until October). Coupled with Ireland (and especially Dublin)'s ridiculous housing crisis and it's a right mess honestly.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby Ogrim » Sat Jul 09, 2022 5:57 pm

I have emigrated and immigrated several times in my life. I went from Norway to Belgium, from Belgium to the UK, from the UK to Spain and from Spain to France. I won't tell my life story, but basically every move was because of work opportunities and, in one case, lack thereof. Looking back I am really grateful that I had the opportunity to move so much and not stay in one country, giving me the chance to experience different cultures, improve my languages or learn new ones. I still follow politics and culture as much as I can in all five countries, because they have become a part of me to some degree.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jul 09, 2022 10:08 pm

Strikingly my experience is a lot like Ogrim's. Similar countries too. Though for an EU citizen, as it was then for me pre-Brexit, things were a lot smoother than e.g. emigrating to Canada or China.

I went from UK to France to Belgium to NL to Germany where we lived for quite some time while my wife had a good contract there, back to NL. Same story about following the culture and politics of these places. I keep up quite a bit, all helped by language and culture familiarity.

Further back in the past I thought about emigrating to Canada. My uncle moved there in 1980 or '81, to Ottawa. After a few visits I really fancied going their myself, but it just never happened. It was always easier to emigrate there from the UK.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby Elsa Maria » Sun Jul 10, 2022 11:14 am

Yes, I moved from the USA to Denmark. I was a 47 year old monolingual. I stayed there five years and now I have been back in the USA for five years. I did not do a great job of learning Danish but I didn’t completely fail either. If I knew then what I know now…You will fare much better in that regard.

If I had known how complicated it was going to be to immigrate and then deal with the challenges of returning, I probably wouldn’t have done it. So I’m glad I didn’t know because I’m glad that I did it :)
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby rdearman » Sun Jul 10, 2022 11:44 am

I immigrated to the UK from the USA. It was a long time ago, and it was mostly straightforward because I had been married to a British National for about 5 years by that time. I don't regret it, and I don't ever visit the USA if it can be avoided. I returned a few years ago when a close family member died but otherwise I steer well clear of the place.
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Re: Have you immigrated?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Jul 10, 2022 12:37 pm

Elsa Maria wrote:If I had known how complicated it was going to be to immigrate and then deal with the challenges of returning, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

Yes. This is often left unspoken. Usually the stories are often about successful immigration, or periods of time spent and then successful return. There are many for whom the process isn't ideal and they either end up permanently in a place where they are only functioning under par, or back to where they came from with a bit of a hole in their lives.
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