Daily Dose of English 123
Emigration
Daily Dose of English 123
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about emigration. Sorry if I sounded weird in that intro there. My glasses fell off. My glasses, like on my face, fell off, or almost fell off rather. And then I have a friend here on the desk with me. Say hello. Meow. Say hello. Okay, he's not saying hi, but he decided to get up and scratch himself and throw hair everywhere. So it was a bit of a wild intro today. Anyways, we got through it. We're here now. And I wanna talk today about emigration. Not immigration, emigration, with an E at the beginning. Immigration with an I is when you move to a new country But emigration is when you leave, when you move away from a country, when you leave a country. And I wanna talk about emigration for a second because yesterday somebody asked me why, basically why I had left the US. And I wanna share a little bit about my thoughts on that and maybe give you some perspective because I don't know, it's a very interesting scenario to be in because the U.S. is the richest country that's ever existed, pretty much full stop. There is a very, very high amount of wealth and development in the United States, in pretty much all 50 states, but that's sort of where the issue starts to come in and the sheer amount of inequality in the U.S. is one of the number one factors why I essentially don't see a future there for me. The country is going to keep on existing forever, but a couple of years ago, kind of a while ago, I was kind of realized that I don't see a future where I want to live in the U.S., if that makes sense. Yes, there's some great things, there's some excellent cities, but there's enough things that are quite negative about it that I made the decision to essentially leave, to emigrate. I have not fully decided where I want to immigrate to, but that will come at some point. But let's start with that inequality thing. That's one of the biggest problems is that, yes, the US is one of the richest countries in the world, but pretty few people see that. I'm from a fairly well-off family, right? It's not like we're rich or anything, but we also don't have to worry about food, for example, or housing. It's not really a concern. Sure, you got to think about your bills, you got to think about, like, save money well. And I always learned to be pretty frugal. That's a good word. Frugal is somebody who doesn't spend a bunch of money. And that plus just my kind of family's past has made that I don't really have to worry. Yes, I have to work. I can't like just buy a bunch of expensive stuff. I don't have an unlimited credit card or anything. But since I'm careful and I make more than I spend, I'm pretty much going to be okay for my life. However, that So I guess let's say there's a pretty small percentage of people that are really rich in the US, right? There's a lot of very rich people, but it's a small percentage. Then there's a bunch of people that are fine, right? Sort of like in my position, where there's like, yeah, there's not really gonna be any problems with money as long as you don't make any big mistakes or anything like that. But then there's a ton of people in sort of a little bit lower of a bracket that I might say, where it's like they're mostly fine if nothing bad happens. And for example, a huge problem is medical debt or school debt, just debt in general. But I think the biggest one is medical debt because I've met many people who are solidly middle class, you might say, where it's not like they really worry about money, but then something big happens for their health. and they have to go to the hospital for whatever, a week or two weeks or something like that. And then they have to pay that off essentially for years, decades even. People that have to get a second job just to pay off their medical debt or they have to sell their whatever. There's a bunch of different things that might happen. I've met somebody that had to leave school. It's like, okay, he broke his leg. And then it's like, I have to either leave school or not actually, the options are fix my leg or leave school, right? And obviously you kind of have to fix your leg. And so he had to like leave school and start working, still recovering from a broken leg. And it's just a broken, like it wasn't a huge thing. Yeah, he had to get surgery, but like that shouldn't put somebody into tens of thousands of dollars of medical debt. And so there's all this, and then going further down, there's plenty of people that have struggled with basic things and like, Being from the richest country in the world, that shouldn't be a problem. Everybody should be able to benefit from those riches. But there are parts of every city, every state that just, people constantly are struggling. They're like, I don't really know where I'm gonna get food tomorrow. I don't really know I'm gonna send my kids to school. I have to pay off all these loans. And it creates a lot of broken systems. And especially in a lot of the systems of the US prey on the people that are the most vulnerable. I think a really good example are payday loans, which are people that need to get their paycheck early. So essentially they go somewhere and say, I'm getting my paycheck in four days. Can you give me the money now? I'll end up paying you a pretty large amount of that. And it's this vicious cycle where people just need a couple hundred dollars just to buy food or diapers or gas to get to their job or whatever it is. And there's no system for them to just get any help at all. It's all just, you gotta go into more debt, more debt, more debt. And so that is probably one of the biggest things. And I'm seeing that I'm running out of time, so I'm not gonna be able to go deep into pretty much any of the other options but even for what I'd say people in my uh I guess general position where it's like I'm not really concerned about that sort of thing for myself but I don't want I don't want to necessarily live somewhere where that is happening to people around me which also brings me into the problem of diversity the U.S. is not very diverse which means there are not a lot of different people living in the same place. Things are pretty sectioned off. This section of the city is where these people live. This is the section of the city where these people live. And I don't really want to live in that kind of place. I want people around me to be different than me, especially thinking forward to a family. When I have kids, I want them to grow up in a place where they learn to exist with people that are very different from them because I think that's an important thing for people to learn because you see people from really like, what's the word? sheltered from really sheltered backgrounds who struggle to think about anything different from their experience because all their friends are, usually it's rich. So all their friends are rich and they all just ask their mom for money and they all just have their own car. And then as soon as they go somewhere else, they realize that not everybody's like that and most people aren't and there's just other ways of living. So I think that's an important thing to have around for somebody as somebody grows up. Another thing for kids that I feel is really important and potentially one of my most, my number one things is autonomy, which means that I want my children to be able to do things on their own and make decisions safely from fairly early on. You can make decisions in like the US, for example, as a kid, but you can't drive, and so you can't go anywhere, because you kind of have to drive in the US. There are some cities where there's okay public transit, but you have to live somewhere that is kind of unsupported or whatever, like downtown very often doesn't have good supports, and there's just tons of cars there anyways, and so it's not very safe for kids. And so that level of autonomy is very important for me. I want kids to be able to get around, to see their friends, to go to the park, to go walking and biking on their own by the time they're eight or nine, because that is a very important thing for growing up and being able to sort of know yourself and your own limits and what you want to do and help control your life. I've met so many people who have just been sheltered, not necessarily because their parents want to, but because there's no real other choice. Or in the case of, and this is a reason that I'm not a huge fan of Mexico, for the same purposes, because it's also, it's the added level of danger, right? Where it is literally more dangerous to be outside in this country. And so all of the like, I mean, I didn't barely got through anything in this episode. Maybe we'll talk about it again later. But there's a bunch of reasons why the U.S. maybe is one of the most successful countries in terms of capitalism. But I see it as a complete failure for making a country where people live in a dignified way. And so that's pretty much the main reason that I've emigrated and I probably will never be going to live there again. I'll certainly go visit and see my family and travel because there's still a lot of great things about the country, of course, but as a permanent living place, I just don't have confidence that it's going to give me and the people that I care about around me the kinds of lives that I want for them, essentially. And yes, I do have the luxury of being able to choose that and being one of the types of people that can emigrate and feel good about it. So many different reasons why that's possible for me. But I really wish that it was just better for everybody, really all over the world, ideally. But yeah, that's probably not gonna happen, sadly. But I don't know. Anyways, I'm over time. This episode's kind of getting sad. But I hope that you at least learned something. I'm very curious to know your thoughts. If you're maybe a little afraid of writing in English. You don't have to, you're welcome to write in your native language and I can translate it in the comments. Or if you're a Spanish speaker, I understand Spanish, you're more than welcome to write in Spanish about your thoughts on this episode or about the sort of things that you would like to see in your country perhaps and what things are important for you or maybe tell me have you emigrated from your home country and why I'd be curious to know but Anyways, that's all that I have for today. I hope that you enjoyed it at least a little bit and maybe learn something new But I'm gonna see you tomorrow. So have a great rest of your day, and I'll talk to you then. Bye.
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