Why I'm Glad I Left America

[Celerity]

Life in France is better, especially now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/american-emigre/616705/



I am sprung from people who emigrated from the country of their birth to America. The United States was their refuge, their hope, and the dream they passed down to us, their American descendants. I could never have imagined as a child that, one day, I would leave America for a better life in another country. Yet that is what I did when I moved from New York to Paris in 2010, and my decision seems wiser by the year. There hasn’t been a day since Donald Trump was elected in 2016 that I haven’t been thankful that I live in France, and not in the United States. Gun violence, white-supremacist militias, the shamelessly voiced opinions that all lives don’t matter—and that if you die from COVID-19, well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles—fill me with dread. So does climate-change denial while the West Coast, where I was born and raised, goes up in smoke. France isn’t paradise. The country has been hit hard by the pandemic, which has thrown more than 1 million people into poverty. Cases are on the rise again, and the government is trying to find a balance between keeping the economy going and protecting lives.

Our president, Emmanuel Macron, is a neoliberal technocrat tacking to the right, but no one in the French leadership has encouraged rebellion against local authorities trying to contain the pandemic, as has happened repeatedly in America. Macron, for all his faults, believes in science and that climate change is real. He is also capable of paying homage to fellow citizens who have been killed by the coronavirus. The pandemic isn’t the only threat we face in France. The country is wrestling with the legacy of its colonial past; a new generation of French-born descendants of former colonized peoples is staking a claim to the country, which they demand include them without erasing their heritage. The trial of alleged accomplices in the January 2015 attack on the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the recent attack with a meat cleaver in front of its old address are reminders that Islamist terrorism is still with us. Yet the risk of dying in a terrorist attack here pales in comparison with the risk of dying in a mass shooting in the United States. Last year, 417 mass shootings occurred in the U.S., and 15,381 people were killed by guns (including suicides, homicides, and accidents). The same year, out of a population of 67 million, 880 people were murdered in France. We don’t have armed militias patrolling our streets or our polling places. I feel far safer here.

France is also a more humane country: Health care, education, affordable housing, paid parental leave, and five weeks of annual paid vacation are seen as rights, not pipe-dream privileges. I feel less vulnerable in France, knowing that if something happens and I can’t take care of myself, France will take care of me. In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked France’s national health-care system the best in the world. The pandemic and budget cuts have strained France’s health system, but it still delivers better care to more people at a lower cost than America’s does. Health-care expenditure per person in the United States tops $10,000 a year. France spends less than $5,000 a year per person, yet infant mortality is lower, the French live longer, and fewer require rehospitalization. Preventive care is free. I recently received reminders to get my regular colon-cancer and breast-cancer screenings done. They won’t cost me a cent. The system isn’t perfect: Too many rural areas and poor suburban areas are “medical deserts,” lacking doctors, clinics, and hospitals. Overall, though, access to quality, affordable medical care is not something the French have to worry about the way Americans do.



Paying for college, the nightmare of the American middle class, is also simply not a source of the same angst in France. Higher education is considered a right. Undergraduate tuition at France’s public universities is just $200 a year for members of the European Union and residents of Quebec. For foreign students, tuition is $3,262 a year. Compare that with UC Berkeley, which charges in-state undergraduate students $14,254 for tuition and nonresident students $44,000. Private universities in France, including the prestigious grandes écoles in business and administration, are more expensive, but are still a bargain compared with the United States. Sciences Po, for example, charges students on a sliding scale based on their parents’ income. Maximum undergraduate tuition is $12,601, whereas tuition at the private liberal-arts college my daughter attended in the United States is now $60,000 a year. Granted, many American students receive financial aid, but most colleges and universities expect students to take on debt as part of their total financial-aid package, saddling young adults with loans some will never be able to repay.

snip

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. Consider yourself one of the lucky ones who CAN

[Afromania]

2. Most people can't as you said. This person is fortunate their life provided that opportunity...

That said, the self congratulatory masturbating involved with this article and ones like it chap my ass. Everybody can not relocate, some people..... most people, are going to have to stay and fight. In the mean time, these article writer ought to keep their involved heavy petting think pieces to themselves.

[Ferrets are Cool]

4. You are, of course, correct

However, if I could, I might try to get into New Zealand. I am 45 years to late for that though.

[LSparkle]

3. Vous avez raison ...

I have never been to Paris ... mais un séjour i hope to at least visit if not to settle there. Until then there is the Tour de France on TV5 (beautiful countryside).

Francophile since age 12 ... Vive la France!

[CurtEastPoint]

5. YUUUUGE Francophile here, too!

I'm too old to move there but I can dream! Hell, I just wanna go back and visit again. I HATED missing France this year. It's been a year since I was there!

[hunter]

6. I lived in France as a sullen teen with crazy parents.

My parents are artists. When I was a kid they got this itch to move to Spain.

It was a wonderful place, a utopia, until my mom told one of Franco's men exactly what she thought of him.

Franco's man went away in a huff but my dad couldn't sleep that night so we packed all our stuff in the car in the middle of the night and we drove off to France.

So we were indigent U.S. Americans living in a French public park, money in Spain.

The local people were so disturbed by us they fed us, and eventually bought us a full tank of gasoline and ferry tickets to England.

My dad repaid them, and then some, when Barclays Bank managed to get his money out of Spain.

[Celerity]

7. sounds like you should write a book, such adventures, it's the type of thing I would read for sure

a sullen teen with crazy parents

yet another reason we do not plan on having children (that and it would have to be via adoption or one of us (deffo not me, so do want to experience that, wifey is more opened to it, eeeek) getting impregnated via sperm donor)

[msongs]

8. beeen there a few times. best advice - avoid paris as much as possible nt

[moonscape]

9. You escaped Trump; now you need

to dodge Le Pen. Hopefully she will never prevail.