You clearly don’t know the challenges of leaving a country and moving to e.g. the EU or Australia or something, or any other country for that matter. Countries are extremely selective of who they want in, they likely won’t accept someone unless they work in a specialization that the country is in a shortage of and is in demand. Most of the world has laws that you can’t accept someone for work in a country unless you can prove that they can’t find a citizen of the country to fill the position first, and afterwards they have to sponsor a work visa for you which is a lot of time, money, and paperwork for the company, so they often avoid it. It’s also a lot of time, money, and paperwork for you.
You can also work as a digital nomad provided you have enough money saved up and can sustain yourself on self-employment (you’re not allowed to work under an employer on these visas), but generally this requires moving between different countries a lot because this is not a path to permanent residency. Some countries have treaties with the US that have a similar, but more lenient, process, for example the DAFT for the Netherlands which basically allows self-employed entrepeneurs to reside in the Netherlands as long as you can sustain yourself the entire time without government aid, and have a spare ~€4500 in a Dutch bank account that you can’t withdraw from at all times.
The other option is trying to get residence or citizenship by descent if you have a parent within 1-4 generations and meet certain criteria depending on what the citizenship laws of the country are – I’m in the process of trying to do this with an adoptive Slovak/Hungarian great-grandparent and adoptive German great-grandparent right now, and I can verify myself that this is also an extremely expensive and time-consuming process that I’m not sure if I can even afford to continue in the future, and the worst part is I don’t even know if it will pay off because my situation is a little fuzzy and possibly doesn’t count. If that doesn’t work, I’m absolutely out of luck for moving out of the US; I’ve tracked down a majority of my biological ancestors in the past 3 centuries and none of them in the past 200 years are from outside of the US. My ancestry for basically until you get to around the 1500s or 1600s is entirely American, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German, Dutch, Belgian, and French, which I’m pretty sure qualifies me for the most white Anglo-Saxon American here.
There’s one other viable choice too – attending university at another country. The problem is there are a lot of criteria you have to meet to be elligible for this in the first place (for one you have to be very young, they usually won’t accept people who are past their 20s), often times American diplomas and 2-year degrees aren’t seen as qualifying you for college outside of the US (in Germany they have the “Abitur” as a requirement for university instead of a diploma, which is somewhat more rigorous than an Associate’s degree, and the only way they accept your high school education as enough is if you gained specific credits and pass a few AP tests while in high school, and they don’t count doing those credits in college it HAS to be while you’re in high school), it’s highly competitive, universities are required to only accept foreigners after they’ve accepted all applicants who are citizens; and it can be incredibly expensive unless you’re going to a country which has no tuition costs and cheap student housing, which less and less countries are doing (Norway recently closed off free tuition for new non-European applicants).
The last options available aren’t viable for a majority of people, but I’ll list them out anyway. For one, you can spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on property in some countries in exchange for a residence visa, a la Spain, Portugal, Cyprus’ Golden Visa programs.
Otherwise, if you can’t afford that (most people trying to escape the US or poorer countries can’t), you can go through literal hell and join the French Foreign Legion at a chance to ask for citizenship of France after a few years – but this is a TERRIBLE decision for anyone to make, the FFL isn’t just a group of soldiers, their entire training is basically abusing you with the worst conditions they can in order to weed out those who aren’t extremely tough, and the soldiers are put in the most intense, mind-and-body breaking deployments imaginable. It is scary and most people aren’t built for it psychologically nor physically. Plus you’re not even guaranteed citizenship, even after serving the 3-year period a lot of people are denied it.
TL;DR, the ability to move out of a country/free-travel-area is relatively exclusive and inaccessible to most people, and only gets less realistic as time goes on due to both age and growing anti-immigrant sentiment in many countries. If you’re part of a group subject to a country’s systematic social & economic issues (i.e. not already in a privileged/well-off position where you can already afford to fund your education or have got the education to work in a highly wanted specialization), it’s practically impossible to migrate to one of the countries that you’ll have more opportunities in, even if you are part of the potential third of Americans who might qualify for citizenship by descent. It’s the reason so many people risk their lives and freedom to illegally cross the border into the US and Europe every year, in a place where the system is against you it’s unlikely most people have access to the means to legally move away.
You clearly don’t know the challenges of leaving a country and moving to e.g. the EU or Australia or something, or any other country for that matter. Countries are extremely selective of who they want in, they likely won’t accept someone unless they work in a specialization that the country is in a shortage of and is in demand. Most of the world has laws that you can’t accept someone for work in a country unless you can prove that they can’t find a citizen of the country to fill the position first, and afterwards they have to sponsor a work visa for you which is a lot of time, money, and paperwork for the company, so they often avoid it. It’s also a lot of time, money, and paperwork for you.
You can also work as a digital nomad provided you have enough money saved up and can sustain yourself on self-employment (you’re not allowed to work under an employer on these visas), but generally this requires moving between different countries a lot because this is not a path to permanent residency. Some countries have treaties with the US that have a similar, but more lenient, process, for example the DAFT for the Netherlands which basically allows self-employed entrepeneurs to reside in the Netherlands as long as you can sustain yourself the entire time without government aid, and have a spare ~€4500 in a Dutch bank account that you can’t withdraw from at all times.
The other option is trying to get residence or citizenship by descent if you have a parent within 1-4 generations and meet certain criteria depending on what the citizenship laws of the country are – I’m in the process of trying to do this with an adoptive Slovak/Hungarian great-grandparent and adoptive German great-grandparent right now, and I can verify myself that this is also an extremely expensive and time-consuming process that I’m not sure if I can even afford to continue in the future, and the worst part is I don’t even know if it will pay off because my situation is a little fuzzy and possibly doesn’t count. If that doesn’t work, I’m absolutely out of luck for moving out of the US; I’ve tracked down a majority of my biological ancestors in the past 3 centuries and none of them in the past 200 years are from outside of the US. My ancestry for basically until you get to around the 1500s or 1600s is entirely American, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German, Dutch, Belgian, and French, which I’m pretty sure qualifies me for the most white Anglo-Saxon American here.
There’s one other viable choice too – attending university at another country. The problem is there are a lot of criteria you have to meet to be elligible for this in the first place (for one you have to be very young, they usually won’t accept people who are past their 20s), often times American diplomas and 2-year degrees aren’t seen as qualifying you for college outside of the US (in Germany they have the “Abitur” as a requirement for university instead of a diploma, which is somewhat more rigorous than an Associate’s degree, and the only way they accept your high school education as enough is if you gained specific credits and pass a few AP tests while in high school, and they don’t count doing those credits in college it HAS to be while you’re in high school), it’s highly competitive, universities are required to only accept foreigners after they’ve accepted all applicants who are citizens; and it can be incredibly expensive unless you’re going to a country which has no tuition costs and cheap student housing, which less and less countries are doing (Norway recently closed off free tuition for new non-European applicants).
The last options available aren’t viable for a majority of people, but I’ll list them out anyway. For one, you can spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on property in some countries in exchange for a residence visa, a la Spain, Portugal, Cyprus’ Golden Visa programs.
Otherwise, if you can’t afford that (most people trying to escape the US or poorer countries can’t), you can go through literal hell and join the French Foreign Legion at a chance to ask for citizenship of France after a few years – but this is a TERRIBLE decision for anyone to make, the FFL isn’t just a group of soldiers, their entire training is basically abusing you with the worst conditions they can in order to weed out those who aren’t extremely tough, and the soldiers are put in the most intense, mind-and-body breaking deployments imaginable. It is scary and most people aren’t built for it psychologically nor physically. Plus you’re not even guaranteed citizenship, even after serving the 3-year period a lot of people are denied it.
TL;DR, the ability to move out of a country/free-travel-area is relatively exclusive and inaccessible to most people, and only gets less realistic as time goes on due to both age and growing anti-immigrant sentiment in many countries. If you’re part of a group subject to a country’s systematic social & economic issues (i.e. not already in a privileged/well-off position where you can already afford to fund your education or have got the education to work in a highly wanted specialization), it’s practically impossible to migrate to one of the countries that you’ll have more opportunities in, even if you are part of the potential third of Americans who might qualify for citizenship by descent. It’s the reason so many people risk their lives and freedom to illegally cross the border into the US and Europe every year, in a place where the system is against you it’s unlikely most people have access to the means to legally move away.