(Written to one of the many fellow USA-born white people I know who have “escaped” the USA for Mexico or Costa Rica or Belize or some other country where the culture is supposedly nicer, and the living is supposedly easier, than in the harsh, brutal society we have co-created here):
“Sounds like you are happy living in Mexico. It always struck me as strange and a bit sad that people like you and me could decide to go live in Mexico, while apparently for so many Mexicans it has become unsafe and they have felt compelled to flee their own homeland. It doesn’t make sense to me. Probably way too big a subject to fit into an email.”
Admittedly, the society we were born into is harsh and brutal. But we share responsibility for co-creating that. And using our privilege to “escape” from it as opposed to using our privilege to help fix the mess is not going to work.
My personal opinion is that we should not feel at all OK about being able to buy ourselves some measure of security, and/or financial luxury, or cultural warmth, by moving to another country where the people are worse off than us. It’s doubly galling when the citizens of that country are having to flee their own homeland because of political violence, climate extremes, or something else life-threatening.
Same goes for USA mainlanders moving to Puerto Rico or Hawaii.