agonyaunt | Care & Feeding: Our Daughter Gave Us a 10 Page Proposal for Emigration

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Care & Feeding: Our Daughter Gave Us a 10 Page Proposal for Emigration

What’s just happened has changed everything for her. I’m a mom to a headstrong teenage girl, and the past few weeks have been challenging to say the least. She is a self-described social justice warrior and a leader in student government and in our small community.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, everything changed for her. We live in Michigan, and she will not stop talking about moving to Canada or another country. She even typed a ten-page proposal on why we need to leave, which was quite impressive. Our family has the money to move, and my husband said he will strongly consider it depending on the outcome of the midterm elections. Personally, it doesn’t sit well with me to leave when things get rough, but things are really rough in America at the moment, so I almost don’t blame her for feeling this way. Any suggestions on how I should talk to her?

—Miffed in Michigan
Your daughter’s pain is understandable and expected for anyone who holds any empathy for people of marginalized groups in this country. Between the rise of overt racism, women’s rights being under attack, police brutality, and a ridiculous amount of gun violence, just to name a few things—I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that America is a complete dumpster fire right now.

As incredibly flawed as America is, I still love this place—and as is the case with anything or anyone we love, we have to keep it real and call it as it is. That said, I feel similarly to you in terms of not running away when the going gets tough.

I don’t think it’s any secret that being a Black person in America is challenging to say the least, and there are times when I feel like crawling into my bed and not moving for hours on end. However, then I think about my ancestors who lived on this land and were beaten, raped, tortured, and killed by their savage captors for centuries. It would be a disgrace to them to sit back and do nothing. That’s why I work as an anti-racism facilitator and speaker for corporations and schools because I know I have the superpower to change the hearts and minds of people. Granted, I’m only one person, but I believe that if enough people stick around and do something meaningful, then we can move mountains.

What could that look like for your daughter? You mentioned she’s in student government, but maybe you can suggest she branch out and volunteer for the political campaigns of candidates who share her ideals. She can mobilize people using social media, rally her community, or speak to her school’s administration to raise awareness about the issues she’s passionate about. The possibilities are endless, but I don’t think throwing in the towel and moving to another country is the best move.

Your daughter’s proposal is likely coming from a place of fear, which is a normal response to the current state of things (for adults and kids alike). It might be helpful to talk to her about times when this country has managed to enact positive changes because people stuck around and fought for them.

The people proposing laws that your daughter is against are hoping people like her pack up her stuff and move away without a fight. I would advise her not to give them what they want.

—Doyin

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Mirabile visu, I think this is pretty good advice from Doyin and even empathetic. Or am I being too easy to please? (I admit that he got me through the heart with "However, then I think about my ancestors who lived on this land and were beaten, raped, tortured, and killed by their savage captors for centuries. " I do this too when I'm struggling -- my ancestors went through so much worse, I have to honor them by trying my best. Which is part of why I'm not looking to pack up and leave, though I do not blame LW's daughter one bit.)

(n.b. Although whenever people go on about the wonders of Canada I think of stories I've been told about incidents inflicted on people of Caribbean descent and I feel thousands of Indigenous children's ghosts at my back.)

I'm not too worried about the past except where it infects the present. The past can't be changed, no matter how much some parties would like to do that, so we're just stuck with it. We can only use the past to learn from and help us change how we act today.

With that said, what I *am* worried about, increasingly, is the ever-larger drought in the Southwest. Canada has a lot of freshwater. We have a lot of guns, and also a larger population. Canada is not nearly far enough away from the USA.

LW's daughter might want to consider New Zealand. I doubt there is any Anglophone country that doesn't have the specters of forced boarding schools etc, but I haven't heard anything particularly terrible about them lately. (Australia is a no go. Not because of the spiders and snakes, but because their treatment of refugees seems to be pulling from the USA playbook.)

Alternatively, she can learn another language, but she'd better pick carefully. The far right is resurgent all over, it seems.

I did pack up and move to Canada, and--now that I'm back in the US probably temporarily--I gotta say...nowhere is perfect. Canada is definitely better in many ways both large and small (and of course it depends where you are) but Americans really don't have a sweet clue about the mosque shootings, the land theft, the residential schools, and, in the province where I was, the appalling state of the medical system (bad before covid, an absolute shambles now, and god help any disabled kid who isn't a perfect model angel or who needs a communication device in those school systems).

Sadly, Canada is... not the utopia LW's daughter thinks it is. There are people and politicians in Canada emboldened by the Trump era, who are actively working to take the country in the same direction as the US.

It doesn't state anywhere in the letter that LW's daughter thinks of Canada as an utopia though? Just better than the US.

I would like to see the daughter's proposal on leaving, listing the reasons why she thinks Canada will be a better solution. Every time something appalling happens in the US, I see Americans proclaim that they plan to immigrate here. (I live in Canada.) I understand and sympathize, I do, but imho moving here is not the ideal solution they think it will be. And that's because most of them don't seem to be aware of the issues Canada has. A lot of issues in Canada are very similar to the US, just not as well-known.

A lot of people don't understand just how much Canada and the US are intertwined and interdependent; what happens in the US spills over here to some degree. Our judicial/legal and political/democratic institutions have been more resilient to right-wing machinations true, but they're not entirely immune; Canada is becoming increasingly politically polarized too.

Canada does not have an abortion law, it's a medical procedure--but timely abortion access is difficult to impossible in many regions, like in Atlantic, rural, or northern Canada. (In most areas, anti-abortion "pregnancy crisis centres" outnumber legitimate abortion/reproductive health clinics.) Basic healthcare access in general (ER wait times, access to family doctors) is rapidly getting out of reach for millions of Canadians, because of decades of cutting it beyond the bone.

Hate crimes against minorities are increasing. Police in Canada are not much different than in the US re interacting with indigenous and racialized groups. Our federal government has fought in court for *years* to avoid providing proper health and education funding for indigenous children. Effects of climate change in Canada are just as serious as in the US. And so on. LW's daughter clearly thinks Canada is better than the US, but from my pov our situation is not as solid as she thinks.

I'm not an American or an Canadian (I'm from Austria) and can't claim to be an expert. But my impression from following the news and listening to peoples experiences is that Canada is more progressive than the US.

Certainly far from perfect and I agree that the situation is not solid. To me it seems that in many countries there's an worrying increase of right wing influence - it's certainly that way in many European countries, including Austria.

But I would have said that the situation in Canada is better than in the US right now, though it's certainly not guaranteed to stay that way. Am I wrong? As someone living there and experiencing the everyday politics and developments, you're certainly better qualified to judge.

I guess I kind of feel that Doyin's response and some of the comments here paint the daughter as naive and not having put actual thought into this - when to me it seems she has been taking this more seriously than LW herself has.

That of course doesn't mean that the family should drop everything and follow daughter's proposal. But a 10 page proposal takes effort and she deserves to be taken seriously and to not have her reasons be dismissed because they come 'from a place of fear'. Fear is a legitimate and reasonable reaction to this situation, and she may have other reasons as well.

IMO LW and her husband should do some soul searching (and maybe research) and think about their own arguments and moral positions and then have an open conversation with their daughter.

For example the LW mentions that her daughter is active in the student council and the community, but not whether she or her husband are. Maybe they could work together as a family towards change and make staying seem more practicable that way?

Ten pages could certainly fit some nuance, that is true. It's a pretty impressively long report on any subject, coming from a teenager.

Emigrating is not as easy as Americans think. Canada is not the 51st state.

The letter doesn't say how old the daughter is, but sending her to college in Canada is certainly possible even if the family doesn't move! I'd ask her to research colleges that would accept her, that the family can afford to send her to, and that offer subjects and quality degrees that will help her establish her own life.

Degrees are not all portable, and she should be aware of this if her goal is to be flexible about where she lives in the future. Credentials like library science degrees tend to be local, while credentials like mechanical engineering are universal.

College in Canada is an excellent idea - not least because it might facilitate working in Canada and perhaps marrying a Canadian. I remember checking at some point to see whether money in a college savings plan (529) could be used abroad, and generally speaking it can, though you have to check if the specific college is listed (over a hundred Canadian colleges are). If they have the resources to move to Canada at all easily, they are the sort of people who probably have significant money in a 529.

If they live in a border city in Michigan, LW's daughter could commute to university/college in Canada.

Trying out a new country with college is an excellent idea!

And yeah, I hate to pour cold water on the daughter's enthusiasm, but I was going to suggest that her next paper should be on how the Canadian immigration system works.

(ETA: Whoops, this was supposed to be a reply to movingfinger's comment.)

Edited 2022-07-12 16:09 (UTC)

LW's daughter may or may not have accurate ideas about Canada - she's a teenager, but a well-informed and politically active one. There are no places on earth that don't have racism or ethnocentrism and other forms of bigotry, and people are always people for good and ill, which means there are always assholes and authoritarians and there are always good people trying to help. BUT that doesn't mean that moving to Canada would make no difference.

Canada has racism, right-wing movements, endemic misogyny etc, but it also has different laws and institutions and crucially, legal rights. Right now, LW's daughter may be feeling a not-unrealistic fear as a young uterus-haver facing mounting forces who are evidently planning to criminalize miscarriage as well as abortion and restrict access to birth control in a state that's hostile to abortion. She could consider relocating, or perhaps going to college in, a state that has put legal protections on abortion, if that's one of her largest sources of anxiety.

Given the amount of research she did, she can probably name other ways in which the laws and institutions in Canada are less threatening/bad, beyond the improvements in these you can get by moving domestically. It's important to support people on the ground in so-called red states (not that Michigan is one) because, as Sarah Kendzior points out, they're all actually purple, and they all contain large numbers of liberal voters who are being systematically disenfranchised by their state governments. It's legitimate and valuable to want to stay in these places and fight as Doyin says, but that doesn't mean it's not legitimate to move out of them.

LW isn't obliged to move because her child wants to, but taking the proposal seriously isn't too much to ask. If LW has a tightly-interwoven community and a strong sense of belonging in her physical environment, by all means, she should stay and fight for it. But it's not inherently cowardice or moral failure to migrate to a less hostile environment.

But it's not inherently cowardice or moral failure to migrate to a less hostile environment.

This.

The Jews fleeing Nazi Germany certainly made the best choice.

And isn't emigration always about wanting to forge a better future for yourself and your loved ones?

Exactly - in fact, I had a line here about my own jewish great-grandparents, who both grew up in NYC because their parents decided to do what apparently Doyin would call "running away" from what is now Poland in the 1930s. Mmmkay, but I'm glad they did... and nobody related to them who didn't come along survived.

Of course this isn't a perfect analogy. We're talking about gendered oppression here specifically with Roe (it's oppression of all uterus havers of course, but we can't pretend that gender isn't the main issue behind it and behind the escalating transphobia). But I still don't think there's any moral or ethical bonus value to choosing to stay in the environment of misogynist oppression. You can support the fight against it from the outside too, after all.

Well, as an immigrant, you got me there.

If one or both my kids decides they want to try to emigrate, the one thing I would advise them is to think about what they'd do if the new place develops intolerable problems down the road. It's a lot easier to start from scratch in a new country when you're 20, still in the process of building your adult life and learning to be an adult in your surrounding culture than it is when you're 40, 50, or 60 and have set down roots. (Of course, in some ways it's a lot easier to stay and fight when you're young and idealistic than when you've had 30 years of the long defeat.)

Being a teenage girl (I am assuming AFAB because otherwise I assume they'd have said) in america, the fall of Roe has more substantial potential affect on her life than it does on Doyin or even her mom. She likely is or wants to be sexually active. If she wants kids, she'll be reckoning with the increased risk to the parent's health of a wanted pregnancy.

I wouldn't send her straight into activism, I'd send her straight into research, personally. What rights are at risk? How can AFAB people protect themselves: in wanted or unwanted pregnancy, in birth control, when receiving medication that might be an abortifacient while technically fertile, online? What rights are by-state? What's at risk in Michigan? Who's fighting for the Michigan rights?

I'd bet that would send her straight into activism, but it might not. In which case, I'd send her to research: one countries have the legal systems that best suit her ideologies? What are the immigration paths to those countries? What skills and languages would she need to learn? What universities are in those countries, and what does she have to study to have a shot to be an international student there? Are there immigration pipelines for Americans of her economic class to migrate there?

Doyin has no standing to tell a teenaged girl to stay and fight if she's (justifiably!) afraid. But her parents have a right to redirect her passion into encouraging her to educate herself about whatever path she takes, and take ownership of the decision.

(Also they should help her manage the fear, but that's separate.)

Being a teenage girl (I am assuming AFAB because otherwise I assume they'd have said) in america, the fall of Roe has more substantial potential affect on her life than it does on Doyin or even her mom.

Agreed. They are in no position to judge.

LW: I almost don’t blame her for feeling this way.

Almost? Pshaw!

Well put. This is the big thing that rubs me wrong about this.

My own family have background in the northern half of the US but my sister and I were raised in the deep south, where she still lives because she has a job there, but my parents have been reacting dismissively to her proposals about moving to a blue state since 2016. But my mom is past menopause, while my sister is in her 20s - she's the person at most risk there!

Same with LW's daughter. Everybody seems to be treating her eminently reasonable fears and her apparently fact-based and well-reasoned approach to the situation a bit condescendingly as if it's a knee-jerk emotional reaction vs their older and cooler heads, when actually it seems to me she's put a lot of thought into what sounds like it at least COULD be a decently serious and plausible plan for her future based on a clear-eyed assessment of circumstances, while LW's resistance is a kneejerk emotional response that she doesn't even bother to fully parse.

Everybody seems to be treating her eminently reasonable fears and her apparently fact-based and well-reasoned approach to the situation a bit condescendingly as if it's a knee-jerk emotional reaction vs their older and cooler heads, when actually it seems to me she's put a lot of thought into what sounds like it at least COULD be a decently serious and plausible plan for her future based on a clear-eyed assessment of circumstances, while LW's resistance is a kneejerk emotional response that she doesn't even bother to fully parse.

LW's resistance definitely is a reflexive and unconsidered response which she should have been encouraged to examine, but I didn't think Doyin was being dismissive of the LW's daughter's viewpoint, not least because he used being Black in the US as an example of how hard it can be to live in this country in order to illuminate how hard it is/is going to be for a young woman. I found that surprisingly empathetic of him.

OK yeah, that's true, good point. He acknowledged her fear well; it's just that the end of the response focuses on staying and fighting which gave it a little more weight in my mind, I guess.

(And I totally agree your mom shouldn't be dismissive of your sister's desire to move, sheesh.)

So the "do a degree abroad" approach is definitely a good one.

Also, I'm... not entirely okay with the idea that emigrating is antithetical to "standing and fighting". Sometimes you have to fight from a distance--- they're not talking about giving up citizenship, and if the over-18s in the family can still vote, and all of them can write/make other forms of political commentary and disseminate them, and fundraise, andandand from somewhere that the body and person of, in particular, the female teenager is at less threat, that's... not necessarily cowardice as opposed to a tactical retreat to a better position. Especially when you take in the extent to which the Supreme ~~Congress~~ is coming for a lot of other rights if they can.

In another direction, since the "move elsewhere" plan was the teen's idea and she's clearly up on how to research and present ideas, maybe ask if she's up for moving from "why" to "how" in her research--- get her looking into which countries she might want the family to move to and what's involved in emigrating there. (And on the flip side, also "what to do if we stay?" as well, again maybe.) Depending on the relationship of the parents to the kid, they may want to be involved to varying degrees with that process.

"Get your teenager to do all the research legwork for a whole-family move" is not advice I would give in a lot of situations, but since the teenager (look, I've heard the arguments, but I really want to call someone who does a 10-page prospectus on the reasons for her family to emigrate a young woman even if she's not a legal adult because damn it she's earned that level of respect from me) came up with the idea and has shown some research and persuasive writing skills, that's advice I feel comfortable giving for this one.

I'm second-generation American. Emigration doesn't seem out of the question to me because I know a lot of people who have done it, including immediate family members.

But it is a huge undertaking. My childhood was shaped by being in an immigrant family. I was culturally out of step with other American children, I spoke a different language at home, and instead of going to Disney World on summer break, we flew back to our first "home."

LW's daughter is justified to consider emigrating in response to Supreme Court decision, but she's not entitled to demand her parents do the same. If her parents want to remain in the US, the daughter can emigrate when she is an adult.

The language issue may be one reason LW's daughter chose Canada, yeah.

I have a hopefully funny story for you. When I was about ten I said to my parents, "WHY did you move from one English speaking country to another?! All of my friends are from Korea or China or Puerto Rico! Everyone is bilingual except me!" Fortunately they thought this was hilarious, and looking back at how much harder it would have been if I'd had to learn English atop all the cultural mismatches I can't help but snicker at my younger self.

I also wish I spoke Chinese, Korean or Spanish! Those are useful languages. My first language is Dutch, and I get few benefits from being bilingual.

As a child, speaking Dutch allowed me to participate more fully in daily life during our regular, extended trips back to the Netherlands. Now I barely use it except to talk to my mother, and we could speak English; we just don't.

I still go to NL occasionally, but only on short trips. The language is nice to have, but the average visitor doesn't need it. Almost all Dutch people speak English.

FWIW, there's some evidence that simply being bilingual is good for your brain function no matter what languages they are.

A conversation I've been having with my own kiddo revolves around "we can do things to make changes. however, you have to recognize when you've changed people's minds and not let it screw up your grades." (c.f. her Reagan Republican teacher at least accepting genderqueer kids and singular they after much arguing.)

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Care & Feeding: Our Daughter Gave Us a 10 Page Proposal for Emigration

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