Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Place To Relocate? 999
New submitter tsakas writes: "I am an IT researcher from southern Europe looking for a good place to relocate. Markets are pulling the teeth out of the strong European countries by destroying the south. The U.S. is in debt and there is no way of telling how long this can go on. China and India are on the rise. Brazil and Australia are looking good. The question: Which city would you choose to go and start a family if you were to stay there for a) 5, b) 10 and c) 20 years?"
Kansas (Score:5, Informative)
Google Fiber
US (Score:2, Informative)
Check Out this place: (Score:4, Informative)
where, oh where (Score:2, Informative)
Regardless of what order you list the cities and/or countries today, you would have a completely different list in 5, again in 10 and yet another in 20. I'd say your pick should be based on the culture you're most comfortable with.
Personally, I'd stay the heck away from India and China. I would leave if I were in either place. Both countries have serious infrastructure issues. And I would not want to live in a slave state ( China ), regardless if they seem to be opening up. That is only for the well connected. The working slobs have it worse than anywhere else in the wolrd. Hong Kong is an exception, but that is slowly fading.
Re:Kansas (Score:2, Informative)
Google Fiber
Kansas CITY.
Three quarters of which are in Missouri.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
One word.... (Score:4, Informative)
Sweden (Score:3, Informative)
The economy here isn't bad at all and it's quite peaceful, even in the capital Stockholm. :)
Sweden's definitely a great place to start a family as the society do a lot for the parents (compared to many countries).
I moved there a year ago and I have no regret at all
Oh, and Swedish isn't that difficult to learn at all, you'll be just fine speaking English until you learn it!
Bonus: if you haven't found a spouse yet, I can say that there are some really beautiful girls here too ;)
Re:US (Score:5, Informative)
Also FYI, be good at what you do and no financial crisis can hurt you.
History tells a different story.
Being good at what you do alone will not insulate you from financial crisis's, you also have to make good business decisions.
Re:Too little info (Score:5, Informative)
It's funny how people from Western countries with ridiculously lax immigration procedures go abroad, expecting every country to be just like their own. They are shocked, shocked to find out that a visa is a sovereign act of a nation and it is that country's choice to set the rules.
Brazil (Score:4, Informative)
We are not. No education to speak of, a government which is making the same mistakes which resulted in the European crisis, lots of crime and violence. Also we are more and more becoming an exporter of commodities, because our tax system is totally regressive and cumulative, working against manufacturing and services by making everything very, very expensive — and we have lower salaries than those of the First World.
I lived in Europe. Only reason I did not stay was that I was not allowed to.
Re:where, oh where (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sorry, but that is a gross calumny of what the economic climate is in China. I am not sure what you mean by 'working slob' but a white guy from Europe who knows English well enough to write this 'Ask Slashdot' question and is an 'IT researcher' would do very well in China. For that matter, most Chinese that have family in a major city and successfully graduate from a decent high school and university will find employment that gives them comparable buying power to other first-world nations as long as they buy primarily domestic goods.
Now if you criticized their political climate for being oppressive and caustic to liberty I would have agreed with you whole heartedly. But as far as economics go, the reality is that the Chinese analogue to your average urban middle-class American actually does quite well and lives comfortably in China.
Re:US (Score:5, Informative)
The US's major creditor is itself [wikipedia.org]. Foreign investment accounts for only 32% of US debt. China just happens to be the largest single foreign owner, but their ownership of total US debt is only about $1.2 Trillion or about 11% of total debt.
You are correct though, China's economy is very dependent upon the US and they do not have enough control, power, influence, etc, to crash the US economy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:US (Score:4, Informative)
Melbourne, Vienna, or Vancouver (Score:4, Informative)
source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9475307/London-slips-down-list-of-best-cities-despite-glorious-Olympics.html [telegraph.co.uk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities [wikipedia.org]
Re:Oh Canada! (Score:4, Informative)
It depends on which way you go about it. The usual one, where you apply for permanent residency from outside the country... yeah, good luck with waiting for the backlog there. On the other hand, the provincial nominee program (PNP), where you get in the country on a regular work visa, work for a year, and then apply for PR, is still a reasonably fast and simple way to get PR and then citizenship. Less problem with "oversubscribing" there because there are far fewer people who can get a work visa to begin with, and once you're in, you go on a priority track. And you don't have to worry about visa terms, since, once you've applied for PNP, if your work visa expires you can extend it essentially indefinitely and make it open (i.e. not tied to a particular employer) until you get a final judgment on your PR.
Case in point: it took me ~2 years to get PR, starting from early 2010. This is for BC, so I don't know how other provinces fare in comparison - I'd expect the backlog to be somewhat bigger in Ontario and Quebec, and about the same in Alberta.
Re:US (Score:4, Informative)
Canada? In the west? No. The U.S. is still being used as the world's currency for trading the world's fuel: Oil. It has a massive debt but that debt is being propped-up by everyone else, so we still have many good years left.
I would locate to the Northeast along the I-95 corridor since there are tons & tons of jobs there. Also lots of cities so you'll never get bored. (And you can get Free TV because those same cities broadcast free entertainment on almost every channel (6 to 51).) The northeast also has cheap internet. I pay $15 a month for DSL, or have the option to pay $50 a month for highspeed FiOS or cable.
Re:Too little info (Score:4, Informative)
India and Australia speak English.
Scandanavia (Score:5, Informative)
If by "Europe" is doing badly you must surely mean the Eurozone. Unemployment in Norway/Sweden/even formerly bankrupt Iceland is very good. If you're having kids, the 2 months mandatory paternity leave in Sweden would be nice. You'd get to spend time with your kids and not have to work all the time and it allows your spouse to keep a career too. The governments themselves are very stable with the lowest levels of corruption in the world (if only Greece could say the same!), allowing the high tax rate to give you a decent rate of return on services you receive.
In short, it's the southern European welfare state on steroids but done responsibly.
Re:US (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Montreal, qc, Oh Canada (Score:2, Informative)
Montreal is definitely NOT the place to be in IT.
Political instability - the separatist Parti Quebecois is leading in the polls and the election is less than a month away. And there's the nightly anti-gov't demonstations.
Debt, debt and MORE debt - if Quebec were to separate, it would be as indebted as Italy, Ireland, Greece or Spain;
It used to have the 2nd-highest taxes in the western world, but with the last 2 tax increases now ranks #1;
regressive taxation caused by failure to index taxes for a generation. Someone earning the minimum wage pays more in provincial taxes (base rate starts at 16.5% to the province) than someone making $40,000 per year in Ontario 100 miles to the west (base rate 5.05%, larger base exemption, fewer mandatory levies). Even Alberta's flat 10% tax rate is much better;
Language laws - your kids won't be allowed to attend english schools unless YOU attended an English school in either Quebec or somewhere else in Canada. English schools outside the country don't count.
More taxes coming up next year, even though taxation has now passed the theoretical tipping point, and the last increase resulted in a dollar-for-dollar loss of economic activity in the first 3 months of 2012;
Crime and corruption - street shootings are becoming a daily occurrence, despite guns being banned.
Most corrupt western government in the world since at least 1991 - corruption is now estimated to cost every taxpayer $500 per year. In other words, Quebec would not be running a deficit if it weren't for corruption (and with the highest taxes anywhere, it SHOULDN'T be running a deficit - especially since it also receives over 8 BILLION a year in equalization payments, mostly from Alberta - that's $100 per person per month in govt welfare, not counting the $850 million in excess DEI payments, and the billions in indirect subsides).
The "multi-cultural" is not really - official gov't policy is that "les autres" ("the others", immigrants) should be assimilated into the "French Fact" (and this despite the fact that the "French Fact" is unsustainable - what are you going to do, ban the Internet, satellite TV, English music and movies, etc? You could force every kid into french-only schooling, and french will still be a dead language within 2 generations);
Decades of under-funded health care (diverting federal grants, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, to other programs) and education;
A demographic time bomb that over the next decade will explode, as the number of seniors grows faster than pretty much anywhere else; already, the system is dependent on illegal workers making less than the minimum wage (I know people who are working for $4/hour) to contain costs.
Nobody I've spoken to outside of Quebec gives a sh*t any more - if Quebec wants to separate, good riddance. The rest of the country (7 provinces with 50% of the population minimum) has the right to hold a constitutional meeting and reset Quebec's borders to what they were at confederation (costing Quebec most of its' territory).
And the "Plan Nord? What a joke - "Up to 20,000 jobs!!!" Hey, Quebec lost more than that in just one MONTH.
Re:US (Score:5, Informative)
The US - still the best place to live
That's simply not true. The best places to live are canada, australia or northern europe.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities or http://money.msn.com/family-money/the-worlds-15-best-places-to-live/ etc.
For a southern european the best (and by far easiest) bet is simply northern europe, including germany, but preferably somewhere not in the euro zone. Even somewhere that is indexed to the euro, but not on the euro.
The US can be lucrative if you're in IT. But it has unnecessarily long work hours, bad health care, and a persistent civil rights and racism problem that aren't worth dealing with if you can avoid it. Not that europe doesn't have racism problems too, but they're different than in the US, so why deal with the US problem at all? If you go to the US and have kids you have to worry about the education they'll get, how you'll pay for post secondary etc. In a civilized country those are problems, but at 1/10th the magnitude, so why would you deal with it? Healthcare is the same sort of problem. If you're going to the US you may as well talk about brazil, russia, china, there are all very lucrative opportunities but you can also end up really screwed if the police or government or just some random local asshole decides they want rid of you.
If you're seriously worried about politics then the US and UK in particular are bad places to be. Both have political parties (the conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US) pushing thoroughly discredited economic policies on their own country, and that again, is just not worth dealing with. It's not that their problems aren't solvable, it's that the people in charge are deliberately not solving them. Germany is in the same boat, but their discredited policies are fucking over the rest of europe, rather than themselves.
Failing a european solution, which from an immigration perspective is by far the easiest, your second choice is probably canada. Australia is probably more lucrative, and you don't have to worry about being dragged down by the americans the way we do in canada, or buried in our own internal political stupidity (the french separatists in quebec, the Alberta-ontario split on oil vs manufacturing etc.) but canada is much closer to europe physically, which makes going home a lot less painful.
Then it's a matter of immigration. I'm not 100% sure on australia, but I would think they have the same thing as everywhere else, if you have paper IT skills it's easier to get immigration, at which point any of canada, australia, new zealand all work reasonably well.
The problem is the questioner is an "IT Researcher". It's hard to know what exactly that means. Is that a PhD in some IT field looking for a faculty position? Then basically anywhere you can find a job is the right answer, because faculty positions are decent everywhere. If you're looking for private sector research that's much harder, because it depends what you can do exactly.
It's not that there aren't great opportunities in second and 3rd world countries, there are, but if you don't know your way around the local system it's very hard to capitalize on those without a lot of money to start with. If you're just looking for a job to settle your life down with, then go somewhere with a high per capita income, decent vacation time, decent education and decent healthcare (on which the US gets 1/4, canada australia 3/4 and northern europe 4/4).
Re:US (Score:3, Informative)
Unemployment is much lower in Alberta and BC than Oregon and Washington. (Roughly 6% vs roughly 8%)
The Canadian dollar is stronger than the US dollar. (Roughly $1.02 right now)
British Columbia household debt is lower, Canadian federal debt is lower (even as a share of GDP), Canadian economic forecasts are stronger for the 5-year time horizon. Canadians pay LOWER taxes than someone living in a higher-tax state (like California), yet this pays for health care and more generous unemployment benefits if you are not employed.
Other than the money being green and the patriotitism being frothy, what is better exactly? Specifics, please.
Disclaimer: I've lived extensively in both countries, in Ontario, BC and Alberta as well as California, Washington, Missouri and Texas. I strongly prefer Canadian culture and it's great now that the economy is ALSO better. :-)
From southern Europe? (Score:4, Informative)
Giorgo, is that you?
On a more serious tone, and as others pointed out above, you should have provided us with more clues. Relocating is an issue with lots of variables that vary strongly in each case. Having said that, all tips that one can give you can only be vague/anecdotal at best. Here are mine:
1. I am Greek working in Germany for 7 years now. Whether you can feel safe economically here strongly depends on who you work for. I work for a large chemical company (>15.000 employes worldwide) and can't complain. However, we now hire only if we explicitly need to fill a vacant place.
2. My Greek family and friends from my school/university years are all over the globe: Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, UK. Those that are still in Greece plan to go away. However, this should come as no surprise. Greeks always had the tendency to migrate (also for no apparent reason) and this can only be enhanced by an economic crisis.
3. Strangely, some friends that were in USA came back (before the crisis broke out). Personal reasons also came into play, but it seemed that the conditions in the USA were not overwhelmingly good so as to encourage their stay.
4. In Australia you first need to get a well paying job in order to qualify for a visa. You can't go there looking for a job as many would imagine. This is likely to be valid for other countries as well.
My 2 cents.
Re:US (Score:5, Informative)
It is a huge Deal!
No, really, it's not. Saying it's a huge deal doesn't make it a huge deal.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/pages/textview.aspx?data=yield
Your debt is at negative interest rates for anything past 10 year notes. 16 trillion dollars is spread across 330 million people.
What matters isn't how much debt you have. That sounds strange, but hear me out. If you owed me 1 million dollars but I was charging you 1% interest a year (10k/year) you could probably manage. If you owed me 100k at 10% interest a year the net cost is the same. So then the issue with the US is whether or not your interest rates are going to magically spike (which despite all the predictions they haven't), and if they do whether or not you can still pay the debt off. Which you can.
The US debt problem is *entirely* an artificial political construction. Right now you should be borrowing several hundred billion dollars a year more to fund job creation (in this case in particular probably infrastructure rebuilding) so you can get the economy back to growing. Paying people unemployment when you could pay them to do work is simply stupid. Leaving people unemployed when there is work that needs to be done and you can borrow money at negative interest rates to pay them to do it is willful damage to the economy.
The way out of any debt problem for a government once the economy picks back up (which is different from a person) is to manage the money supply to keep interest rates low relative to nominal GDP growth (nominal GDP grows with inflation, productivity and population), and then make sure you have sensible tax revenue, especially when the economy is doing well. The US has a nominal GDP growth rate of 5% a year over the last 60 or so years (and remember the government can tweak that number itself with inflation and immigration), so even running a 4% of GDP deficit (which right now would be about 640 billion dollars) is still shrinking the relative size of the debt, which is all that matters.
I'm from Canada too, but I disagree with you. (Score:4, Informative)
Have been to the UK, and most of Europe, have lived in the US and in the Congo.
While there are parts of the USA that are nice, on the whole I'll stick with Canada, thanks. Of course our current government really would like to turn Canada into the USA, while I think we'd be better off with a bit less of a gap between haves and have-nots.
Re:US (Score:2, Informative)
Nice country, and generally friendly people too...but just too fucking cold up there.....
Re:One word.... (Score:4, Informative)
Singapore. I worked there for two weeks at the Marina Bay Sands project. English is the primary language, the area is beautiful and clean. Hated coming home. I'd still move my wife and kids there in a second.
Singapore is nice, just be ware of the various laws and lack of freedoms. They still have caning in Singapore, and the death penalty. No idea what the safety net's like if you get laid off either -- Healthcare, schooling etc.
Re:US (Score:5, Informative)
You've never been to Australia, mate. Better quality of life. EU style healthcare so you don't lose your life savings when some doctor surprises you with his out-of-network facility or lab fees. If you get cancer and are too weak to work you don't lose your health coverage, so there's at least some chance of continuing medical treatment undisrupted to possibly beat your disease or at least leave your kids an inheritance. Better work-life balance, longer vacations, less expensive to fly from Oz to hundreds of tropical destinations. A road trip could take you to any type of landscape you prefer (though mostly desert in the interior, but no worse than the American West).
Australia doesn't have as many "enemies" as America, so traveling with an Aussie passport is generally safer, and it isn't as likely to get nuked off the planet in WW3. Only problem is so many people want to move to Australia that immigration is tight. But if you're under 40 and have technical or trade skills you'll probably get in. It helps to speak English like a native speaker, as well as if you come from a Commonwealth country. The Aussies, due to geography, have an advantage trading with China, India, and other nations in the Pacific Rim. Very little national debt, so economy is great, but trying hard to get more immigrants with high-tech skills. Lots of land in the interior, though water is in short supply, so sustainable agriculture for a growing population could be an issue in the future. If China ever seeks military expansion like Japan in WW2 then Australia could be a target for invasion, but what are the odds, right? China on the warpath wouldn't be good for anybody in the way, and the USA is more of a threat to China than Australia. All said, thousands of miles of ocean separating Australia from the rest of the world means that military threats can only come from heavily industrialized nations with substantial military forces. There is illegal immigration, but limited to boat people, so no porous border issues to worry about. Little to no terrorist threat to Aussie soil, though occaissionally Aussies can be targeted in hot zones if the terrorists can't find any Americans. Australia tends to be more "out of sight - out of mind" and generally not considered a threat to any other nations. Aussies also benefit from being a Commonwealth country, making future travel or immigration easier. Better social safety net for people down on their luck (though some abusers too lazy to work, so taxes are higher than the US). Relationship with indigenous people can be touchy at times due to abuses in the past, and some present-day conflicts over sacred sites, but Australian aborigines tend to be easy to get along with. Much less racism compared to KKK and Black Panthers in America. Murder rate is lower as well (4.2 in US vs. 1.0 in Australia, per UNODC). All in all its hard to imagine a much better place.
Re:US (Score:4, Informative)
1. The Average Canadian is now richer than the average American. [time.com]
2. Regarding Canada's federal debt. As of a year ago Canada's total Public Debt hit $1.1 Trillion [huffingtonpost.ca], but that was only 57.9 % debt to GDP ratio. That is regarded as low and is perfectly fine. Canada can handle that just fine and still sustain robust economic growth. The US recently exceeded a ratio of 100% debt to GDP ratio [zerohedge.com]. That is bad because when the debt ratio exceeds 85-90 % then economic growth is inhibited significantly.
Canada did the right thing running up the deficit during the recession so as to maintain economic growth. The U.S also had to do the same to keep the recession from expanding into a full blown depression. But Canada had good fundamentals -- a relatively low debt -- so it could run large deficits for a while without undue long term effects. It can lower spending later and bring the deficit down using expanded revenues from future GDP growth. The U.S was not in as good a shape having already run large deficits through out the Bush years. Now we are saddled with a huge debt burden that is sapping our growth dooming us to many years of low growth and high unemployment.
This is a list of the ten countries most in debt based on this percentage. [247wallst.com]
Re:US (Score:4, Informative)
It's a myth that the US still has the highest social mobility. It used to, but it stalled. Europe is now the better place to make your ambitions come true, unless you are already rich and you want to become a millionaire. The US is still the millionaire's paradise.
The minimum of corruption is also false. Corruption is inherent in the US political system, which relies on corporate money. Corruption is much lower in northern Europe (but less so in the south).
The US is a great place to be for the haves. They control the money, the media, the politics, the government, the patents, etc. It can still be okay if you can get support from the haves: VCs, get bought by a major company, etc. But if you want to be your own man, do your own thing, and benefit from your own growth, Europe is the better place now.