Why I Don’t Recommend US Emigrants Move to Portugal or Spain
Conscientious Emigrants should watch the global sociopolitical landscape, not the blogs that parrot each other
Photo: Elizabeth Silleck La Rue, with an old Android and no filter. Desc: an old door in Barcelona. The old architecture is absolutely beautiful, and replicated in the Mexican city of Merida almost exactly. Merida is much closer, I’m just saying.
If you peruse the online writing world around “expats” and emigration from the US (or even if you get mainstream media news push notifications on your phone) you’ll note that Spain and Portugal are touted as top destinations on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
Best places to retire? Spain and Portugal top the list.
Cheapest places to live? Spain and Portugal are inevitably somewhere in there.
Best places for digital nomads? Portugal and…you guessed it.
Best places for LGBTQ+ migrants? Yet again.
I think it’s time to stop listening to this advice and start leaving these two countries off the shortlists for most prospective emigrants from the US.
I’ve held this opinion and conveyed it to clients for months now, but some recent developments make it clear it’s time to speak up.
Note: I don’t debate for free. If you disagree with this article, go for it. But don’t expect me to try to convince you — you will be sorely disappointed. I have things to do, like help clients migrate to other countries besides Spain and Portugal.
Note #2: I block and report trolls and those who are rude immediately.
Let’s start with the development that is most jarring, though all of these artificially siloed issues are interconnected and interrelated; I parse and number them because I know it helps readability.
In Portugal (and throughout Europe), the political landscape is shifting rightward. Portugal’s recent election confirmed the far-right Chega party as its majority opposition party. Every week, for my newsletter The Conscientious Emigrant, I compile a list of news links for a section called “Far-Right Watch.” Every week, more and more signals emerge telling us that Europe, as a whole, is undergoing a fundamental rightward shift, spurred on by MAGA, Russian propaganda, and billionaire tech bros with a white Christo-fascist nationalist agenda. Portugal has been perceived as insulated from this wave, but clearly, it is not.
In both countries, housing crises and anti-foreigner sentiment is growing. Newsletter curation attunes me to this, as well. Protests in Mallorca, Canary Islands, Barcelona, and other Spanish locations are a weekly occurrence. The fierce backlash, in particular to speculative investments in housing for short-term rentals and resulting rising housing prices, have locals fed all the way up. Short-term rental profiteers insist that the solution is to “build more housing,” which is of course is nonsensical from an urban planning perspective — increasing impervious surfaces through development and adding pressure to an already inadequate power infrastructure are just two of the reasons why “build more” could create more problems. Just look at Florida to see how casually tossing up housing only exponentially exacerbates environmental problems associated with overdevelopment. I’ll address these two next.