We Need to Be Pragmatic
Boy, has this been a week!
Don't worry. This is not a newsletter about the politics of the election; your inbox is likely full of those and if you’re like me they’re all unread. I am not going to sit here and play armchair political strategist and try to unpack what transpired on Tuesday. That commodity is in abundant supply elsewhere.
This week’s newsletter is going to be practical rather than punditry or polemics. To my chagrin, a bunch of stuff that I wrote and worked on from 2017 to 2021 is relevant again, and I want to help steer folks toward useful info. I am going to use the newsletter to crowdsource answers and direct some of you to some work I’ve done elsewhere.
Here goes.
One of the areas where the incoming administration has been most clear about their intent is immigration. The most popular signs at the RNC read “Mass Deportations Now!” They intend to deport record numbers of undocumented people. But they plan to cast a wider net than that—they also intend to make it more difficult to come to the US legally. They plan to gut the system that allows asylum seekers to enter the country, fleeing persecution in their home countries. This was foreshadowed in the campaign. The Haitian migrants baselessly accused of eating pets in Ohio are here legally under “temporary protected status” something the incoming admin intends to revoke, meaning they will be eligible for rapid deportation.
In addition, the incoming administration has said it will make it harder for US citizens to get green cards for their foreign born spouses and harder to make them citizens. They will also pursue denaturalization, the involuntary revoking of citizenship to immigrants who became citizens in the past.
That last one is ghastly and went largely undiscussed in the campaign.
We’re talking about the potential forced deportation of tens of millions of people and tens of millions of your fellow citizens are enthralled about it.
I say all this because many students in my old classroom and many US classrooms come from mixed status families. Maybe the children are US citizens, but one or both parents are not. These families are incredibly vulnerable to immigration enforcement. Imagine coming home from school one day and finding both your parents are missing and have been taken to an ICE Detention Center.
Schools are potential sites of immigration enforcement. In 2017, in cooperation with the Washington Dream Coalition, NW Immigrants Rights Project, ACLU, and the Tacoma teachers union, we organized a town hall for teachers about the rights and protections that apply to them, their schools, and their students when dealing with immigration enforcement. Below is a video of that town hall and here is a list of resources for teachers and communities.
Under current federal guidance, schools are considered a protected space from immigration enforcement. But that is federal guidance, rather than codified federal law, meaning it’s subject to change at the whim of the incoming administration.
On the other end of the immigration conversation, I got this note from a longtime reader back home that’s considering an exit: “Any chance you have tips for non-educators when it comes to relocating? I’m done here.”
For obvious reasons, I know more about the process for educators and will circle back to that in a bit. That said, here are some sources and forums that I have found useful in the past:
The subreddit r/AmerExit is stacked with accounts from every case you can think of from people moving to almost every destination imaginable: What if your passport has your dead name on it? Can you get EU citizenship via Croatian lineage even though Croatia wasn’t a country when you were born? How much real estate must one buy in Turkey to get permanent residence? It’s an indispensable source.
HSBC has an entire division dedicated to serving expatriates from various places around the globe. Here’s their “so, ya thinking about moving abroad” guide. It's a great step-by-step starting point (I swear this isn’t sponsored content).
Lastly, I don’t mess with the Nomad Capitalist’s politics but his YouTube library is unrivaled on this topic, including info about visa rules across Eastern Europe, SE Asia, and Latin America. For example, here’s a video about countries where you can get a second passport for the cost of some legwork.
If you have advice that would be useful for non-educators looking to seek employment overseas, I invite you to share it, and I’ll pass it along next week.
For the teachers out there, I did an episode with Search Associates in 2023, they’re the company that I used to match with my school here in the Gulf. One of their associates came on the podcast and talked step-by-step through the process of landing an overseas teaching gig. It was the most downloaded episode of the pod over the last six days.
Lastly, a reader sent an email asking about how election might shape federal education policy. The last episode of the podcast we released before the election tackled this question. My guest Anne Lutz Hernanadez talked about the cast of characters likely to be appointed to lead the Department of Ed: the Book-Banning-Mom’s-for-Liberty-co-founder, the “Ten Commandments” State School Supe of Oklahoma, and the normie by comparison (but still bad) Governor of Virginia, are the front-runners.
Anne is as sharp a pundit and writer as anyone out there. She recapped the education record of the incoming administration and warned listeners about the wave of privatization and budget busting voucher programs that are likely in the offing.
Listen y'all, we're in very charted historical territory: this is Rome in 1922, Madrid in 1936, or Athens in 1967. People of goodwill need to be proactive rather than licking their wounds or engaging in unproductive circular firing squads on social media. While much of it feels overwhelming, understanding the challenges and preparing is crucial.
Feel free to reach out with your questions or insights.
See you in a week.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.