against the fleeing to europe industrial complex
a brief polemic
I only have three days in Slovenia this time, down from three months, or six, depending on how successful I am at pulling the strings. It’s hard for me to get back here, and I don’t have time this year to prolong things. All the usual plans, the scrappy wiles, the connections have fallen through. That, or I haven’t the will to revive them. It occurs to me now, however, that I’ve built up a lot in the three years I’ve spent long spans of time in Slovenia — a life, one could say. Right now, I’m sitting in a cafe, a cafe I visit so often that even though I haven’t been here in a year, my order is well-remembered. I make small talk with the waiter in the language I learned out of curiosity and ease of living, a quixotic exception amid all those people in tečaj whose grandmothers wanted them to learn, whose boyfriends broke up with them before the semester ended, whose children deserved (that was always the browbeating word) to grow up in a truly bilingual household. It is easy to be bitter about all this, but Slovenia is already my home, and I intend to pay it a visit, the same as I would my little hometown. I just can’t stay here as long as I want to.
And yes, it’s quite painful, really, to think about this not-staying. I don’t like dwelling upon the trip back home, where the topsy-turvey world of American politics is more than mere spectacle, where it instead defines the atavistic contours of American life. That being said, I also feel the need to be honest, really honest, about my prospects for relocating abroad, and probably yours also.
And so, in this cafe, as 80s Yugo Rock mumbles through a broken speaker, I count them off, one by one, the things I don’t have: No apartment abroad, no job, no inkling of a job, no grad school acceptance letter, no startup with slush funding. Even worse, I have no relatives and no bloodline, which is the easiest way. You can get to Europe somewhat simply if you have family ties (including if said family is owed reparations, on a count of Europe’s many heinous crimes), or if you marry. But the rest of us, those who are ancestrally inconvenient or romantically occupied have to work harder for it. They will instead have to struggle, and the struggle, if you’ll heed my advice, is likely to be humiliating.
You will, perhaps, have to make no fewer than ten trips to the same small Slovenian town because there is always one more piece of paper to file, and each piece of paper requires a physical signature in the presence of a witness. By the time you get the last one in, get your tax number all sorted out, it will come as a rather silly victory, wrested from the jaws of bureaucracy only at the very end of your allotted visa stay. And you will laugh, because the alternative is weeping. Hell, at least that year, you had a job. Without a job (which, if we are being honest, are rarely doled out to foreigners), lots of money — thousands if not tens of thousands of euros — and a helluva lawyer, moving abroad is probably not going to happen for you. Or, at least, it is not going to come easily.
They don’t like to tell you about these pesky little inconveniences in the posts. You know the ones: the posts that demand that you leave the US now — right now — before it’s too late, if it’s not too late already. These posts — let’s call them the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex — are a familiar sight for anyone who’s ended up on the wrong side of lib Substack. Usually headed by AI art and penned by bourgeois white people with their professional degrees in their usernames, these essays tend to have a certain LinkedIn je nais se quoi. Quoting everyone from ex-mil opsec guys to Heather Cox Richardson, they will tell you that if you don’t leave everything behind and flee the country right now, you will get put in a prison camp or die of starvation from tariffs or crushed under the boot of martial law, if they bother to spell that correctly. Such posts go on and on about why the author is scared — petrified, even — and why you should be scared, too, and how the only rational choice to be made in your best interest is to pack up and ship out.
To be fair, the current administration has given us plenty of reasons to be legitimately frightened, especially with regards to the dismantling of the state, the rollbacks on regulation, and crackdowns on freedoms of speech, movement (especially across borders), and assembly. But how our fears will map out onto our material and political reality is anything but settled, and this is something we have, despite what the posts will tell you, some collective agency to change and a duty to try changing it. However, politics as anything other than mediated spectacle doesn’t particulary matter to the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex. If you’re making your decisions based on a recursive algorithm full of millenarian lib content on Substack then sure, the hysteria is real, it’s definitely too late. They’re coming for you and you, you’re the smart one for getting out now. Everything you do is valid and correct and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
First of all, I am inherently wary of anything that speaks me in a breathless language of fear. As a woman, I am somewhat inured to being sold things by way of anxiety, though I realize not everyone is. I’ve spent a lifetime having my most intimate fears be seen as fair game for clicks, attention, spectacle, and weaponization. If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated. Hence, it does not surprise me to see that many of these posts purporting to “help you” vis a vis fear are instead selling something: consulting services, affliate links, financial planning resources, access to insider information, guidebooks, a community, et cetera, et cetera. Hence why, throughout any given Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex essay, the tone often changes, bit by bit, from fear to the ersatz reassurance of self help. I did it and so can you.
But sometimes, these posts aren’t selling anything but sympathy, and of this I’m not a particularly keen buyer. How many of them have you seen at this point — the tearful through-composed screeds about why I just needed to get the fuck out, the handwaving about the fucking fascists, the inability to distinguish between real and imagined threats, the idea that all of this is happening to me personally and that I am the protagonist of history who knows where things are going because I passed AP World and watched Schindler’s List — and, for that matter, the constant invocation of past exiled and traumatized generations whose lives and conditions are not one-to-one comparable to ours, for the political situation is different and the most draconian persecutions are now being mapped onto different lines, different bodies. First they came for undocumented immigrants, and you are not an undocumented immigrant. You are a certified CPA in New York City.
I don’t like to throw around the p word lightly, but if you have the means and mobility to suddenly move to Europe at the drop of a hat, or even within a year, you are privileged enough in every sense of the word that a) the actions of this administration are going to have a negligible impact on you compared to others and b) you should perhaps be thinking about how you can use that privilege to try and mitigate harm instead of giving way entirely to unearned hysteria, which, by the way, is the only thing any of these posters are truly “fleeing.”
At this current moment, the threat levels are mixed. It’s never been great for women and people of color in this country, and it’ll certainly take more than a bit of struggle to work our way back to where things were even a few years ago, much less achieve total liberation. However, unless you are Palestinian, a student protester, transgender, or a person on various rungs of the immigration ladder, especially someone of Latin American descent, which is to say: unless you are among the people being actively and directly targeted by the Trump administration and who perhaps should consider the possibility of asylum or relocation — the worst is probably not going to happen to you. And because the worst is probably not going to happen to you, you have, I think, a basic human duty to protect those to whom it is already happening. In protecting those to whom the worst is already happening, you are, by extension also protecting yourself. You are putting out the flames before they lap at your doorstep. You are stitching yourself into the human safety net known as society, something to which you have, sorry, an obligation. You are, quite literally, fighting fascism.
But no, the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex wants you to feel sorry for them. They want you to understand why they chose to leave their families behind, why their big fat American salaries and retirement accounts are not contributing to the problem of gentrification in Europe because things are just so bad in the States. They want you to know how it’s so hard and lonely living without any real human connection save for other expats, or why they thought it was justified to put in an asylum case for themselves with the help of their expensive lawyer to the detriment of refugees the world over who aren’t fortunate enough to do a preparatory stint as a digital nomad in Porto just to see what it’s like to live in a walkable neighborhood and say isn’t it crazy how much better the bread is over here?
It is not enough for such people to leave voluntarily. They will not rest until they co-opt the rhetoric of exile. They frame ditching their spouse or grown children as having their family torn apart by the Trump administration. They want you to view what is, in reality, a matter of consumption as a matter of coercion. They want you to validate their cowardice with understanding. But late at night, in their AirBNBs, they will think to themselves: you saw fascism coming and you did nothing. You saw people put in camps and you did nothing. You have no obligation to anyone other than yourself and believe in nothing beyond the confines of your own material comfort. You did not flee. You ran away.
Let me be clear: I personally don’t care if you, or anyone else for that matter, decide to emigrate abroad. I would too, if it were an option for me, simply because I like living in Slovenia way more than I like living in the US. When the Trump administration first unleashed its blitzkreig against the government and the populace, I, too panicked, and repeatedly thought: I have to get out of here now. However, as distressing as the situation may be, it is uncouth at best and insulting at worse to pretend that the state is actually forcing people like me into exile, that I’m in any kind of legitimate danger, or that I’m moving away as an act of valor, or for any reason higher than because I want to, because it’s what I prefer over sticking around. At its most pressing, moving abroad is what any given person thinks is better for them, their health, or their family, and that’s fine! That’s totally fine! You don’t need to write a handwringing essay about it explaining to others why we should feel sorry that you had to go live in Portugal! Moving abroad, rather like eloping, is one of those famous situations where it’s entirely possible to do something drastic and be completely normal and chill about it! As the orange man says, many such cases!!!
Yet even as a matter of simple personal preference, I think relocation remains more difficult than people are selling it to be. Sure, the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex talks about how it’s hard to make friends from scratch and how it sucks that they don’t have American-style convenience culture in Europe in lieu of, like, labor rights. But what they don’t want to actually talk about is the money. It is far harder to financially leave the United States than it is to physically leave. The IRS really wants you to pay your taxes and your employer is probably not so keen on doing the paperwork necessary to turn your remote job into a global one.
I myself have established the social and linguistic infrastructures for moving to Europe. I could probably even weasel my way into a grad degree. But money is the number one reason I don’t, or rather can’t pull the trigger. The financial cost of lawyers and logistics as well as the difficulty of transferring the means of making a living as a freelancer to another country are all a nightmare. Meanwhile, my husband’s life is not as flexible as mine and it would be nigh impossible for him to get any work whatsoever without learning a new language. Unlike the essay peddlers of the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Comples, who are willing to adopt all manners of family therapy jargon, my answer to this problem is not simply leaving my husband behind, or, if we’re talking broadly about family, my aging parents either. While I have friends in Slovenia, I also have networks of local support here, people that matter to me and to whom I matter and I refuse to treat these places and people disposably. But most of all, although I have no great patriotism for my country, especially in its present iteration, I do feel as though I owe it to my community and to future generations to do my best to make things better.
The common response to this latter sentiment is cynicism, which is to say, treating me as though I am stupid and naive. But in my view, cynicism is no match for the smaller truth of mitigation — perhaps not prevention, but mitigation. For things to get better, they must first become less bad. Hence, the idea that “no one is doing anything” is ludicrous. Ordinary people are putting their lives on the line for others every day. They are confronting ICE and protecting their neighbors. They are peacefully occupying their schools in protest of genocide, despite the threat of losing their degrees, or worse, deportation. They are speaking out to journalists and organizing their workplaces. They are out in the streets and watching the courts. For this, I respect them. I do not think their efforts are worthless or a form of self-sacrifice at the alter of an impossible ideal. They believe, rightly, that nothing is inevitable until it is. No one has won until they have finally, truly won. Many who leave are honest with themselves and have made their peace with their choice. But just as many have wrongly accepted that the worst is inevitable. In fact, they’re fine with that, just as they are fine ceding ground by omission to those who deserve to be losers. All it does is justify that same decision, the decision to walk away.
By the way, on my last day in Slovenia, I always go to visit the town of Ptuj, which is a place very dear to me, a place where history has largely stopped happening and, in its place, time passes. In Ptuj Castle, a winding structure whose medieval roots have long been obscured by baroque-era machinations, there is a fifteenth century statue of Saint Barbara carved by an unknown German master. She is perhaps my favorite object in the entire world. I think of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of architecture and artillerymen alike, quite often. Her story is rather gruesome. Barbara, despite her virginal isolation, secretly converts to Christianity. When this is revealed to her pagan father through, of all things, an architectural detail — Barbara’s insistance on a three-windowed (representing the Trinity) rather than two-windowed wall in her bath house — he cruelly imprisons his daughter and condemns her to torture. Day in, day out the torturers come, but each morning, Barbara wakes up, miraculously healed, until the problem is finally solved by way of a strategic beheading.
Medieval depictions of saints are always victors over their own suffering. It is not so encouraging to depict Barbara being flogged and flayed in the tower. Hence, this Saint Barbara, draped magesterially in red and white fabric, smiles her wise, beatific smile. Her eyes are bright and curious, and there is something encouraging about them, an eagerness to present to the viewer both herself and what she holds in her hands: the tower. She is smiling, perhaps, because she has the satisfaction of looking back on her own life with the surety of what she believes, and what she believes, she offers to you, the faithful, having already struggled for it herself. She holds the tower, a representational vessel of her own pain, not to say, I have conquered difficulty, but to say, difficulty is all there is, for me and for you, because what is on the other side of struggle cannot be gleaned until we are already among the stars.
My Saint Barbara is not arrogant with a martyr’s certainty. She is patient. She has seen all things. From her post — next to her sister statue Saint Catherine, with whom she once sat on either side of the alter at the castle of Velika Nedelja — she’s watched over five hundred years of history, five hundred years of Teutonic Knights, priests, and laborers, of bureaucrats feudal and post-feudal. I visit her whenever I get the chance because I love her, because I want to be like her. I want to be patient. I want to be wise. I want to be brave enough to see beyond myself, to wake up calmly, every day, to the horrors. The tower, the place that for me is a source of suffering is, as it was for her, also my home. And when all is said and done, whether I am beheaded or sleep peacefully, I, too, want to one day hold it in the palm of my hand.