Some Unexpectedly Broad Policy Lessons from the Nitty-Gritty Details of Expatriation
Would anyone who moved out of the United States before the onset of the current dystopia be so crazy as to move back? In "Emerald Farewell," published here on Dorf on Law two months ago, I revealed that at least one such crazy person exists. It is I. In that column, I mostly limited myself to offering a broad assessment of Dublin, which was my final foreign stop before returning to the US at the end of 2025. I concluded with this somewhat snarky comment about Ireland: "It's a great place to visit. Full stop."
In that column, I also teased a future Verdict column:
In an upcoming column on Verdict (from which I have been on leave), I will explain in some detail the pluses and minuses of expatriation in all of their gory, practical detail. That column will also include my attempt to respond to those who might be saying, "Wait, you were actually out, and you chose to return now?"
That new column, published this morning, is "American Repatriation? Why Would Anyone Move Back, Especially Now?" Verdict's excellent editor wrote this blurb describing the column:
Law professor and economist Neil H. Buchanan recounts his three-year experience emigrating through the Netherlands, Canada, and Ireland before returning to the United States. Professor Buchanan suggests that while the impulse to leave the US is understandable, expatriation is far more logistically grueling, expensive, and isolating than most people anticipate—and explains that these practical realities, rather than any resolution of the political concerns that drove him abroad, were central to his decision to return.
As it happens, I disagree with that summary. Even so, I am not asking the editor to change it, because I can see that it is a fair way to read the piece. Moreover, the distinction between his description and my intention is illuminating.
He is certainly right that the political realities at home offered no enticement to go back, but the practical realities were absolutely not "central to [my] decision to return." Those realities were daily irritants that I am happy no longer to be enduring, but they did not in any way drive my decision. And that difference does matter, because I intended my message in that column to be: "For anyone who has thought about expatriating, here are some unexpected cons to take into account when you think about the pros; and for anyone who is thinking about coming back, I can testify that there is a surprising upside to being where things feel familiar and easy." That, however, is far from a statement those those cons should be dispositive.
I have not, in fact, described why I decided to leave Dublin, and I have no plans to do so. I will say only that my reasons were professional and personal, with no need to state the professional reasons because I see no point in disparaging publicly the people involved, and the personal reasons are simply that: personal.
Frequent readers of my columns are certainly aware that I regularly use personal anecdotes and some self-revelatory comments to spice up and sometimes motivate my columns. While that is true, I always include such tidbits in service of some larger argument or policy point. Readers who continue to the end of this column will find that that is the case again here.
As noted above, one of the larger points in today's Verdict column was to inform people who might be thinking about expatriating about the unforeseeable (but surely surmountable) challenges that they will face. In turn, people who have no intention of moving can learn what their decision has spared them.
Again, however, I was more than willing to deal with all of the expense and nonsense involved in leaving and staying away, especially because (as I noted in the column) a large number of the annoyances were once-and-that's-that matters. Navigating the immigration laws to be able to reside in a country is the most obvious one-time matter, although it is important to point out that the "once" can and does go on for months or years, and it also costs quite a bit of money before getting to "that's that."
Writing today's Verdict column presented the challenge of just how far into the weeds I should go in describing the practical challenges of moving abroad. I focused on some particularly harrowing -- albeit funny, but only in retrospect -- events of my dealings with immigration lawyers and tax advisors. (Because I was focusing on the cautionary tales, I did not happen to mention one big surprise, which was that my realtors in all three places were fantastic. Having had very mixed experiences in the US, that was a relief.) Those immigration and financial matters were unquestionably essential issues, but there were plenty of other things that might seem like nitpicky details that should be left on the cutting room floor.
Instead, the Verdict editor asked me to add some of those small details, which I obliged with a list that included things like financial transaction fees, figuring out where to buy basic pharmaceuticals (and learning the local brands), and even spending a full day trying to find where to buy moving boxes. (I am not kidding about that last one.)
Notably, we are now living in a world where many of the longstanding annoyances and expenses of being outside of the US are no longer salient, especially with the rise of non-cash transactions. Many people barely ever use cash in the US, and it is even easier to be cash-free in other countries. Things like travelers checks and even ATM compatibility issues and fees are blessedly no longer part of our lives.
Even so, there are still many, many seemingly small things that can become big things. Here, I want to add to the list in my Verdict column, again to make a larger point that ultimately has some serious policy implications. For now, however, prepare for both nittiness and grittiness.
Moving abroad means changing phone numbers, which honestly surprised me, because I thought that I could keep my US cellphone number if I was willing to continue to pay foreign roaming fees. Not true, so after a couple of months in Toronto, I had no choice but to change carriers and get a Canadian number. Leaving aside just how ridiculously bad the customer service is among the major carriers there (incompetence, of course, plus relentless up-selling that is disguised as politeness), it would seem that changing to a new phone line would be a minor matter that might involve only as much time as needed to choose which duopolist to overpay and then to set up service.
If only. Even though Canada uses the same country code as the US (+1) and the same area code and phone number system, some -- but not all -- businesses' systems are incapable of processing transactions based on Canadian phone numbers. Even fewer are able to deal with phone numbers with different country codes (+353 for Ireland, +31 for the Netherlands), different lengths of area codes, or 8-digit versus 7-digit numbers. As a consequence, US-based transactions -- and believe me when I say that every US expat it going to continue to do a LOT of US-based transactions online -- that require entering a phone number will simply not be possible.
This carries over to physical addresses as well. My credit union in the US, for example, has an online change-of-address form, but the dreaded red asterisk (*, indicating a required item) sits next to the fields for not only City but State and Zip Code. A few systems include Canadian provinces on the list of states, and fewer still recognize foreign postal codes (which typically include letters and more than 5 characters). When that becomes a problem, the only alternative is to call customer service. Unfortunately, customer service calls often involve long hold times, and my experience with foreign cellphone carriers put me in many situations in which it turned out that my international roaming plans did not include certain international calls. One month's bill in Ireland included an extra 90 euros ($105) for two calls to US banks, totaling 30 minutes.
Are your eyes glazing over yet? Try living with that level of unknowability for nearly every transaction that one might need to make. Another unexpected, seemingly trivial example: I wanted to continue to make contributions to my grandkids' college savings plans, but the online system for the company that processes such payments requires that donors outside the US send paper checks to an address in Virginia. So one of the least reliable services in the world -- international postal delivery -- now has to be involved, and at a premium cost.
Even the largest institutions are sometimes incapable of dealing with the nit and the grit of non-US transactions. It otherwise made sense for me to continue to use the credit card that I have been using for decades, which is provided by one of the largest US banks. Although most transactions went through, the bank's security protocols sometimes required that I enter one of those six-digit codes that is sent by text. But because that bank's phone system could not recognize non-US numbers, those transactions were impossible. Over the space of a year, I spent at least five hours on the phone -- mostly on hold -- with that bank's customer service office (at least those calls were free), and despite being told again and again that the problem was solved, it never was. Again, this is a global banking behemoth.
Finally, speaking of those two-factor authorization codes, guess what happens when a person's phone number has changed? In some cases, the system allows alternative authorization (such as email), but many systems embody the perfect Catch 22 in allowing a person to change their contact phone number only by receiving a code at their old contact phone number. And this was not only on systems where the interaction was minor (like buying a product online). In fact, the login systems for US government services make it impossible to change one's number from abroad after the existing US-based number has been discontinued. This meant, among other things, that I could not navigate Medicare issues online, which was especially bad when the Trump DOGE teams devastated customer service for Social Security and Medicare. I only was able to do what I needed to do by contacting the US embassy in Dublin, which for some reason was still set up to provide real customer service.
There are countless additional examples, but even I have limited capacity to vent about such things. In any event, this deluge of details is the tip of the iceberg for Americans living abroad. Some are easy to handle, and some go away permanently. Some (even the most trivial), however, can be nearly impossible to fix, and there is always a sense of vague uncertainty looming over daily life, with some new and completely impossible to anticipate mini-hell possibly taking up hours or days of one's time.
Again, however, that was not "central to [my] decision to return." If the professional or the personal sides of life had gone even half as well as I had reason to expect, I would still be over there, and my daily life would simply involve accepting that being outside of the States takes a huge, unanticipated toll in extra expense, lost time, and ongoing frustrations of all sorts.
So one larger lesson here is that international migration is extremely difficult, even for people with adequate funds and training in things like law and finance. No one should imagine -- for themselves moving away or for anyone moving to the US -- that anything about moving to a new country is simple or easy. I shudder to imagine what it is like for people who come to this country and try to comply with everything that they will face, especially people who are here because of threats to their lives back home and who have little or no money.
Another, even larger implication of all of these nasty little details is that hassles are bad for people's lives and for the economy as a whole. In a column last September, I described how the process of filing taxes -- not the taxes themselves -- imposed costs that could make certain economic activities not worth the candle (and which explains a large part of my absence from Verdict over the past year):
Although Irish tax rates are a bit higher than those in the US, they are nowhere near the level that might make even a pro-tax liberal say, "Eh, not worth it." But that level does exist, as the ridiculous persistence of the so-called Laffer Curve makes clear, with its trivially true observation that a government that charges 100 percent tax rates would surely collect no revenue. Not true here [in Ireland]. What is true, however, is that if I were simply to trigger any tax obligation, I would simultaneously trigger a process that would incur filing costs. Those costs would include not only fees paid to tax professionals but time spent finding and providing the documentation that would be required to file my tax return properly. The accountancy fees are not proportional to the amount of income involved, and I figured out that paying an accountant to handle even relatively trivial earnings would create the functional equivalent of a 100 percent tax rate. (As an odd but reasonably close analogy, think of it as the equivalent of paying even a small cover charge to enter a pub, but you’re only planning to order one soft drink.) ...
[T]he non-tax burdens caused me to say, "I can wait." This combination of facts and circumstances "destroyed wealth" in the sense that Justia will not provide a product that it would otherwise have been willing to provide, and I chose not to provide it even though it means ending up somewhat less wealthy.
The breakup of the international order is causing many serious issues, often matters of life and death. Without in any way trying to diminish those tragedies, it is worth emphasizing that anything that makes international coordination more difficult has untold knock-on effects that people might not even realize are happening, all because of some stupid leaders' beliefs that their countries can go it alone. Those politicians are right in the literal sense embodied by North Korea's isolation, but they are quite wrong that it is easy to be discoordinated with the rest of the world.
The US is seeing only the beginnings of those costs now. The UK is still reeling from its insane decision to leave the EU ten years ago. Given my Scottish last name, I have always felt an emotional pull toward favoring the break up of the United Kingdom, to allow my ancestral land finally to be free. If an independent Scotland were allowed to rejoin the EU as a new country, that would be less costly (in the broadest sense of that word) than it would otherwise be, but of course the leaders of Europe have every reason to discourage national breakups and piecemeal new memberships. And the people who are pushing for Alberta's independence from Canada must be smoking something.
Do the logistics of two-factor authorization, cellphone plans, or online address protocols have implications for people's lives? Absolutely. The people who try to move to other countries (and, in many cases, succeed) see those costs up front, while most other people are unaware of how many things are going right behind the scenes in their socially, financially, technically, and politically integrated worlds.
Special note to readers: Thanks very much for sticking around to the end of this column, which was admittedly a bit of a ride.
- Neil H. Buchanan