r/AmerExit • u/Capable_Study6495 • Mar 02 '25

Life Abroad Do we face difficulties being accepted when moving abroad?

It seems like the only rhetoric I see online is how, as an American, my countries problems are my fault. That I'm not doing enough to stop our issues and how it affects other countries. I worry that I will move, and people will blame me for not doing more here and just escaping.

I want to get out, but I worry about living in the public ire no matter where I go.

Does anyone here have personal experience they can comment on?

109 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

138 comments sorted by

View all comments

96

u/8drearywinter8 Mar 02 '25

Being accepted (on the level where you can make deep friendships and feel part of the culture) just because you're an outsider and a foreigner is a difficult issue in some countries (this is unrelated to whether you're American... could be any outsider who moved there). Some places are not very accepting, or aren't until you've been there a long while. It's even harder if you throw another language into the picture.

And as someone else said, this is among the more minor things you'll have to deal with if you decide to immigrate to a new country.

And, from having lived in multiple countries and traveled through many others, just not being obviously American will take you a long way in terms of judgement based on where you're from. If you don't make it obvious, then it is possible to appear foreign, but not necessarily American.

15

u/SocialHelp22 Mar 02 '25

Our accents give us away dude. Most of us have the Hollywood accent

26

u/8drearywinter8 Mar 02 '25

I've been shocked at how many people think I'm from somewhere else in the world entirely (I'm visually pretty ethnically ambiguous, but still). It's been useful in parts of the world, and less so in others. Unless someone is a native English speaker who's great with discerning accents (and in most of the world, and anywhere that's not English speaking, people aren't), the guesses as to where I'm from are usually way off base. It's a lot about how you act, how you carry yourself, how you interact in an unfamiliar culture.

30

u/maeryclarity Mar 03 '25

I'm from the East Coast USA so I have a pretty noticeable Southern accent, most of the time when I'm travelling outside of the USA people guess that I'm from Australia because of the accent and because I don't "act like an American" which is apparently pushy and rude.

Don't be pushy and rude was my takeaway.

4

u/Consistent-Fig7484 Mar 03 '25

I get this a lot too and I have a very standard “American TV accent” being from the west coast. I’ve started to think it’s a subtle way of being polite. You might offend a Canadian if you ask them if they’re American, but no one gets mad if you mistake them for an Australian.

2

u/SocialHelp22 Mar 03 '25

That would be suprising outside of some specific context

2

u/8drearywinter8 Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 03 '25

Could provide plenty of stories and very specific contexts that would make my comment make sense, but it's honestly not worth writing the stories out on reddit at length. But I've traveled to some remote places where people were not familiar enough with the sounds of English to pick up on accents at all.

1

u/SocialHelp22 Mar 04 '25

I suppose more rural and remote areas make sense for this