Inequality, identity and American emigration in a changing European landscape

Social concerns that American emigrés to Europe inevitably face

After nearly sixteen years of living in Europe, as an emigré from the United States, awareness of my status as someone from somewhere else has evolved in certain ways.

The societal impact of immigration has intensified during that time—the crises in Syria, the Middle East more generally, Africa and Ukraine have only added to the steady pressure of migration from places where lives are threatened by climate change or political conflict.

Now, migration trends from affluent parts of the world, including financially comfortable retirees and “digital nomads” from the U.S., are also becoming a part of Europeans’ concerns about immigration’s impact on society. Specifically, those concerns relate to competition for public resources, housing and employment, social inequalities, and other social/cultural issues.

This essay reflects on these concerns. It is not based primarily on official or press reports, nor on quantitative social indicators; rather these are observations filtered through the lens of lived experience in Ireland and, now, France.

Graffiti, Blackrock Baths, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland (photo J Howard)

Perspective

In 2008, my family and I made the decision to relocate from the U.S. to a jurisdiction that provided firm assurance of continued healthcare for all family members, regardless of “pre-existing medical conditions.” We flew to Dublin to interview for jobs in the public university sector in February 2009 and were informed of the search committee’s decision to recommend us for appointment on the day of the interview—I was to be named University Librarian, and an academic appointment was to be negotiated before a contract would be signed; my wife interviewed for another senior administrative role and was also appointed. We celebrated in the evening with the individual who was to become our future boss at an upscale restaurant in the Ballsbridge neighbourhood of Dublin.

The circumstances we would be leaving behind in the U.S. were dire. Our university employer had been forced in the second quarter of 2008 to reduce its annual spending by an amount equal to twenty percent of its annual operating budget. All hiring had been frozen. I was made responsible for identifying many staff members in my line of reporting to be laid off—the worst experience of my professional career. I had to make other consequential budget decisions as well. Furloughs—effectively a cut in pay—were put into place for all employees as a mechanism for achieving salary savings, without actually adjusting nominal salaries.

Ireland seemed to be a few steps behind in responding to the financial downturn. The signs of a financial crisis due to the real estate bubble were clear when we interviewed in early 2009, but the optimism of the Celtic Tiger years had not yet fully disappeared in this area of the Irish public service. We were invited to return in April 2009 to finalise arrangements and sign contracts. At that time our boss-to-be met us again for dinner. When we indicated that part of our objective was to explore Dublin and housing options he generously offered a chauffeured tour with “his driver,” a gentleman who operated a private livery business, to help get a feeling for the villages and neighbourhoods of south Dublin. The buoyant sense of optimism we’d witnessed previously continued—it felt like we were given the red-carpet treatment. Green cards were issued, and we began to plan in earnest for our first international move, just a few months away. It almost seemed like the start of a great adventure.

Out of the frying pan …

Once we arrived in Dublin in September, the full impact of the financial crash was apparent everywhere. The government was in crisis and disarray. Insolvent banks (AIB, Anglo Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, EBS, Irish Life Group, and the Irish Nationwide Building Society) had failed and were bailed out, controversially, by the government at enormous expense. Mortgages ceased and the housing market ground to a halt. We rented a terraced house in the Rathmines neighbourhood that had been renovated speculatively for sale, but banks had ceased to issue mortgage loans and the builder’s only recourse was to rent it. Construction halted across the island, and images of sprawling and empty “ghost estates” across the country were ubiquitous in the news media.

The universities were not spared the public sector hiring freeze, and faced dramatic reductions in the government grants that university operations depended on. We were advised in December 2009 that our salaries would be reduced by eight percent on 1 January 2010—and that was just the first pay reduction. Déjà vu all over again.

As all this unfolded a keen sense of being an outsider began to emerge.

I was summoned to my boss’s office shortly after starting work to be briefed on an issue that focused specifically on my having been employed by the university. Several press organisations had taken note of the university’s announcement of my hiring and had submitted freedom of information requests asking for details—the level of my compensation, contract terms, expenditures for recruitment and relocation, etc. I braced myself for what might follow once the FOI requests had been fulfilled.

It did not take long. As I walked into work one morning a few weeks thereafter a colleague stopped me to say, “They were talking about you on Morning Ireland.” Morning Ireland is the most listened-to radio show in Ireland, broadcast during morning drive time, 7-9AM. The programme host posited that I, an American, had been recruited to fill a job that any Irish person “capable of putting books on shelves” would have been able to fill. My salary—equivalent to a base salary for an Irish university professor—was considered scandalous, and our relocation costs disgraceful.

This was to happen again, at least twice, and at one time I was called out on a popular evening current affairs television programme. My responsibilities were again described as “placing books on shelves”—a phrase intended to trivialise the role of the director of what was at the time Ireland’s largest library. I began to feel like the poster child for irresponsible government hiring at a time when the country was moving toward a painful and humiliating financial bailout and austerity plan dictated by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (referred to at the time as “the Troika”). My having been hired was being discussed not just on radio and television, but also in social media.

Perception versus reality

The reality of my work as a senior administrator was quite different from the hard-working shelvers in the library. When budget cuts were mandated, the university tried to distribute the impact equitably across academic colleges and schools. In the administrative domain, however, the relatively large Library budget proved to be an irresistible target and was impacted disproportionately. Managing the consequences of a devastating budget cut was difficult. I was working simultaneously on coping with staff restructuring—at the time I oversaw the largest departmental workforce on campus—in light of budget reductions and a hiring freeze. I worked at managing staff expectations in a series of "town hall” meetings, and by communicating in person with faculty in their academic units about the elimination of thousands of journal subscriptions and the complete cessation of book-buying.

I was frequently reminded in these meetings of my outsider status. My language was an obvious cue to my non-indigenous status—my accent, my choice of vocabulary, the professional jargon that had embedded itself while I had been working in the U.S. I was interrupted several times by staff members during presentations and Q&A sessions with comments like “we don’t use that word in Ireland”; other complaints about my choice of language were sent by email. There were objections to the concept of “town hall” meetings since they were seen as an American phenomenon. Some faculty members were fond of reminding me that I “wasn’t in America anymore.”

Thankfully I received strong support from my leadership team and supporting staff as I found my footing in this new environment. Circumstances improved with time. Work continued with fewer resources, and financial pressures elsewhere led to some new responsibilities being added to my remit.

However, austerity in the Irish public sector was to become a permanent way of life. Government investment in the universities has never been restored to prior levels, and Irish universities have sought to make up lost revenue by other means, above all through recruitment of non-EU students—especially Americans and Chinese—who pay higher fees; new attention has also been focused on developing income-producing services and facilities.

In due course reminders of being an outsider diminished, and one colleague observed that I had become “Irish-ised.” Perhaps becoming a citizen helped shift my outsider identity a bit in the direction of true Irish-ness (Irish ancestry had not seemed to make much difference), though it was clear that I and my family would always be seen as “blow-ins.”

The experience in general, particularly in those first few years of working in Dublin, heightened my sensitivity to how immigrants can be viewed and received. It was not just the annual trips to the immigration office for visa renewals and spending the day among many who had come to Ireland as refugees or asylum seekers. My experience in general made me more aware that, regardless of the difficult circumstances that prompted and accompanied our departure from America, simply being able to make the changes we had put into place required a certain level of privilege—something that had been more clearly perceived by my new colleagues and countrymen than by myself.

The other “new Irish”

My rocky entrance into the Irish public-sector workplace should also be considered in the context of the difficult period Ireland endured from 2009 through 2015.

From a statistical perspective, the year we moved to Ireland (2009) was a turning point: from 1996 through 2008 the numbers of immigrants to Ireland outnumbered those who emigrated. Then, during our first five years in Ireland (2009-2014), things changed. The “great recession” saw far more residents—many of whom were citizens—leaving the country than were migrating to it (see the figure below). Emigration has, of course, painful memories in Irish culture, as I also knew from my own mother’s family experience leaving Ireland. It was, no doubt, part of this common cultural experience that made my appointment to a senior administrative role in the public sector controversial to some—unemployment grew to 14.6 percent in 2011 and 14.9 percent in 2012¹ and many citizens were forced to leave to find employment.

Ireland, Components of Annual Population Change, 1987-2021 (graphic from the Central Statistics Office)

Migration to Ireland grew in the years following 2014, reaching a 15-year high of 120,700 in the twelve months before May 2022.² The 2022 Irish Census showed that 20 percent of the Irish population had been born outside of Ireland (of which 8 percent had been born in the United States). Since that time, some 105,210 Ukrainians have also found refuge in Ireland.³

As the profile of the Ireland’s population has evolved, the generally tolerant Irish attitude toward immigration has, in turn, become more complex. In the political domain, concerns about the impact of immigration tend to focus on refugee populations, competition for housing, employment, social integration and demands on social services—particularly healthcare. Now, for immigrants of independent means who wish to live or retire in Ireland, the government offers visas to investors or to those seeking residency who meet its conditions, which are demanding relative to some other E.U. countries:

For people of independent means who wish to retire to Ireland, you should have an individual income of €50,000 per year. You must also have access to a lump sum of money to cover any sudden major expenses. This lump sum should be equal to, for example, the price of a residential dwelling in the State [€360,000 in 2025].⁴

In addition, holders of these residency visas are disallowed from taking advantage of Irish social welfare programmes, including healthcare (and are therefore required to maintain private health insurance).

As citizens, these requirements would not have applied to us. But by the time we were able to retire, we had become persuaded that our family’s well-being would be best served elsewhere in the E.U.

Where we are now

Upon retirement at the end of 2021 we moved to France. Our motivation for the move is easy to summarise: change of climate, since the relatively higher year-round humidity in Ireland is less than ideal for the health of a family member (less wind and more sun was part of the reasoning, too); lower cost of living, especially housing; superior healthcare.

The bureaucratic aspect of the move was made easier by virtue of our now being citizens of an E.U. country, so no visas were necessary. Registering for healthcare coverage was effected not just by virtue of being E.U. citizens, it was also facilitated by our having worked and paid social charges⁵ in Ireland for a sufficient period of time to qualify for a transfer of our healthcare entitlements from Ireland to France.⁶

We became resident in Nice, France at the beginning of 2022. It was in the final months of the pandemic, when restrictions on mobility were dissipating but other social constraints were still in effect. This move was different from all that preceded it—we were not moving for work opportunities, it was for retirement and, potentially, a new home for the remainder of our days.

Our reception was unlike what we had experienced in auld Éire. There were no workplace dynamics to figure out, there were no trips to the Préfecture to negotiate residency status. I also did not carry the burden of expectation I had had in Ireland, that my Irish ancestry would somehow ease my acceptance into Irish society (my French ancestry is too distant for me to think of it as a vital part of my identity). But having some genetic linkage to the country also seems irrelevant.

While we were getting settled in our new apartment, on 24 January 2022, a second phase of warfare broke out in Ukraine as Russia attacked on two fronts. Over the next year emergency measures were taken in France to accommodate refugees from the embattled lands of Ukraine. Yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flags were often seen on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, carried by both those displaced and those who welcomed them.

This was a new dimension to older and much more complex issues of migration and immigration in France, such as those that relate to the country’s colonial legacy. Such issues have been made clearly visible in Nice—one need only remember the truck attack of 14 July 2016 in which 86 people perished, or the October 2020 knife attack in the city’s Basilique Notre-Dame de l’Assomption. But the city appears to have generally found a balance between native conservatism and its traditional place as a border city with a diverse cultural heritage. I find its diversity comforting and, as an American, familiar.

Nice has also been seeing immigrants of a different kind—affluent northern Europeans who acquire property for holidays (many of whom then lease them via AirBnB and other such services—something the city of Nice is taking steps to limit), and more recently a steady stream of Americans. The newspaper Le Monde has written about “L’engouement des Américains qui voyagent ou s’expatrient à Nice” (the enthusiasm of the Americans who travel to or expatriate to Nice), and indeed one hears more American accents each year in le vieux Nice and along the Promenade. In 2024 American tourists outnumbered even visitors from neighbouring Italy. Le Monde quotes Adrian Leeds, who operates a service that helps Americans relocate to Paris and Nice: “Depuis la réélection de Trump, je passe chaque jour une heure avec un client qui me dit : ‘Sortez-moi d’ici !’” (“Since the election of Trump, I spend an hour every day with [an American] client who says ‘Get me out of here!’”).

Relocation services and estate agents no doubt welcome this influx of affluent États-Uniens—by April 2025 one-half of all apartment sales in Nice were made by American citizens (many paying with cash).⁷ But native niçois and immigrants from less wealthy domains might have different feelings.

I meet regularly with members of associations that arrange opportunities for native French- and English-speakers to converse for the sake of improving their language abilities. Complaints about immigrants are not uncommon in these conversations, most frequent are complaints of challenges to the schools of children who do not speak French (complaints I take with a grain of salt; what is unspoken is the word “Arabic”).

Recently, however, I have heard criticisms specifically about affluent Americans, purchasing properties at inflated prices and making the city unaffordable to local people. Some also see this cohort as taking advantage of French social services without having spent a lifetime paying the high social charges that support the generous social welfare system. I’m happy to be able to mention in such discussions that I am an E.U. citizen and have paid social welfare dues in another E.U. country. The manifestations of concern about the American presence here, together with my experience in Ireland, nevertheless make me somewhat self-conscious about my origins, especially as the U.S. is viewed increasingly in an adversarial light.

And then …

During grade school the social studies book used by my school told the story of America as it would have been commonly accepted at the time. In that story, America was “the great melting pot,” and the statue of liberty—the “Mother of Exiles”—welcomed the outcast from all corners of the earth. One might charitably say the textbook’s intent was to promote an ideal of equality rather than to depict the experience of all immigrants, and I believe that is what most children took away from it. The message of the “melting pot” was, of course, that all who come to America retain vestiges of their heritage, but that all become real Americans—insiders and participants in an American dream.

Clearly things have changed, and there appear to be many who reject this view.

Things are changing in old Europe as well.

Immigration has become a practical, political and cultural issue in Europe, driven by increasing migrations provoked by climate change, the continent’s colonial past, and global conflicts. The issue has reshaped national politics across Europe and right-wing political groups have risen to power on a firm anti-immigrant stance.

I wonder about the trajectory of change ahead as it affects Americans who choose to leave their country for Europe. Most are privileged to be able to do so; I acknowledge my own privilege in that regard. Privilege is not an endearing quality, however, and privilege that is seen contextually as unearned even less so. Will concerns about inequality move legislatively toward new restrictions on immigration? I believe that has already happened to varying degrees in E.U. countries as visa and naturalisation requirements are becoming more demanding. What about those American emigrés, now settled in the E.U., dependent on remote employment or foreign retirement assets who daily check their investments and the USD/Euro exchange rate? How will the changing arc of American prosperity and global influence impact them, and us?

Where all of this will lead in the longer term may be anybody’s guess, but the complex and difficult socio-political issues relating to immigration and climate change will neither recede not disappear. Human nature and Mother Nature will see to that.

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See also:

1. Central Statistics Office, Ireland , “Press Release Quarterly National Household Survey Quarter 4 2011” (7 March 2012) https://www.cso.ie/en/csolatestnews/pressreleases/2012pressreleases/pressreleasequarterlynationalhouseholdsurveyquarter42011/, and “Press Release Quarterly National Household Survey Quarter 3 2012” (27 February 2013) https://www.cso.ie/en/csolatestnews/pressreleases/2012pressreleases/pressreleasequarterlynationalhouseholdsurveyquarter32012/ (consulted 30 April 2025)

2. Central Statistics Office, Ireland, “Population and Migration Estimates, April 2022: Key Findings” (24 August 2022) https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-pme/populationandmigrationestimatesapril2022/keyfindings/ (consulted 30 April 2025)

3. Central Statistics Office, Ireland, “Census of Population 2022 - Summary Results” (30 May 2023), https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpsr/censusofpopulation2022-summaryresults/migrationanddiversity/ (consulted 30 April 2025)

4. Department of Justice, Ireland, “I want to retire to Ireland” (updated 20 June 2024) https://www.irishimmigration.ie/coming-to-live-in-ireland/i-want-to-retire-to-ireland/ (consulted 30 April 2025)

5. A further word about these social charges, since they make a significant difference with regard to accessing European public services:

By working we had become Irish taxpayers and contributors to Irish “social charges.” Social charges—known formally as Pay-Related Social Insurance (PRSI) and the Universal Social Charge (USC)—support Ireland’s comprehensive social welfare programmes. The former, the PRSI, funds unemployment benefits, the Irish State Pension, maternity and paternity benefits, supports for bereaved spouses and partners, and some health-related expenses; the latter, the USC, is applied to education and social programmes, hospitals and healthcare, and other public infrastructure. In retirement, USC charges continue if income exceeds certain thresholds.

You can think of “social charges” like these as the European equivalent of the FICA deductions that Americans see in their pay-checks—payments mandated by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act that support Social Security and Medicare.

It is the payment of social charges in Europe that entitle us to receive nearly equivalent benefits in any other E.U. country. That is a specific right of a citizen of the E.U. who has paid sufficient social charges. Had we come to France without having paid sufficient social charges, regardless of citizenship, we would have been treated as any other ressortissant, and procedures and terms for receiving healthcare would have been somewhat different. In most E.U. jurisdictions, non-E.U. citizens are required to maintain private health insurance.

6. Regarding the basis for healthcare entitlements for E.U. citizens, see “Your health insurance cover,” YourEurope (undated) https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/health/when-living-abroad/health-insurance-cover/index_en.htm. See also “Standard forms for social security rights,” YourEurope (undated) https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/social-security-and-benefits/social-security-forms/index_en.htm (consulted 29 April 2025)

7. Aline Métais, “Ils plébiscitent Nice et la Côte d'Azur : ‘une vente d'appartement sur deux se fait avec les Américains,’” FranceInfo (10 April 2025) https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/provence-alpes-cote-d-azur/alpes-maritimes/nice/ils-plebiscitent-nice-et-la-cote-d-azur-une-vente-d-appartement-sur-deux-se-fait-avec-les-americains-3136261.html (consulted 4 June 2025)