Ik wil hier mijn mening over amerika en mijn emigratie neerzetten. Hoe de afgelopen 2 jaar voor mij is verlopen, de ups and downs en de vele dingen die ik hier heb meegemaakt. Ik denk dat dit een zeer goed beeld geeft van hoe een emigratie kan lopen en dat niet alles altijd loopt zoals je hoopt.
Ik zal dit in het Engels schrijven aangezien dat op dit moment een beetje beter gaat dan m'n Nederlands hahah.
This topic is totally my opinion and there might be stuff that you don't agree with. Please no bashing or anything like that, I'm just giving MY perspective of the past few years.
So let me start by telling you a bit about myself, I'm 24 years old, male, moved to Los Angeles in August 2007 and have been living there ever since.
Moving to LA was something I always wanted. More opportunities etc. I came to LA for the first time when I was 15 and returned when I was 20. Beautiful weather, family members that lived here and the fact that I was honestly kind of getting tired of living in the Netherlands were motivations for my parents to sign up for the Visa Lottery. We honestly never expected anything from it until we got a phone call from my aunt to tell us we were selected.
Anyways, a year of nothing but stress went by (don't take this too lightly, you will stress your butt off since nothing is still certain at that point!) and we were finally at LAX airport, ready for out new lives to begin.
Excited? Yes. Knew that it was going to be a lot of work? Definitely. Expected to have been through what I actually went through in 2 years? No.
- There are way more opportunities in the US, more businesses, more ways to start your own business, more opportunities to move up to a new position at a business etc.
- There is no CAO or anything like that so yeah you might be 40 years old and get paid $9/h to do your job.
- Credit score is VERY important over here, credit is not really a thing that you get to deal with in NL but you will over here and it can be a pain in the butt for a person that has moved here (even if you live here for a couple years). Your ability to get a car, apartment/house, credit card, loan etc etc are all for a great part based on your credit score/history. Google it.
- The US is better in the smaller details: I don't have to wait 2-10 years to be able to get my own place in a big city: If you have money you can rent it. Stores are open waaaaaaaaay longer then in NL. You don't have to lose $1500 to get your drivers license, it will cost you around $28 TOTAL (depending on the state you live in) etc etc etc and many more small details like that.
I spoke to another person who had moved to LA from Sweden and she had a great quote about the US that I want to share with you guys: The United States makes us fight for the things that we took for granted in Europe. And this is so true.
Want to go to university over here? Why don't you just come up with $5000-7000. Wanna live on your own, attend university full-time and still have somewhat of a life? Forget about it. You don't have the money to stay afloat if you want to do that. Rent in LA is VERY expensive, in return we get sun and 21+ degrees Celsius 350 days a year (plus minus 15 days of cloudy and rainy weather). That does mean that you will be paying $1200 for a 1 bdrm apartment. So how much do you have to earn to be able to afford rent, feed yourself and also go to school? Maybe part-time few classes at a time and that will take many years until you actually can get your bachelor or masters.
And yes you can go live in parts of the country where the rent etc are lower but will there still be the same job opportunities? I don't think so.
Health care. Not as bad as people may think. I pay $128 a month and have a deductible of $1750. Yeah not as great as in NL but it could be worse
Racism. Definitely not as much as in The Netherlands. My background is Persian and the first question EVERYBODY had when I was still in NL was: "denk je niet dat ze daar als arabier gaan zien?". My answer was: hell no. And I got this confirmed when I actually came here. The biggest problem in the Netherlands is the clash between "allochtoon" and "autochtoon", trust me there are no 2 words that I hate more in this world then those 2! I was getting sick of living in NL just because of the fact that that whole generalization existed. Sick of the marokkanen that lived in my neighborhood and were up to no good and sick of people constantly putting me in that "allochtoon box" just because I have brown hair and brown eyes.
In America, everybody is American! I'm American and you're American! Have an accent? People love to know where you're from.
Everybody comes here for the same reason, to work their asses of for a better life. No uitkering here. Unless you just jumped the border and can't speak a word English, but that's a different story. These people come here and absolutely work their asses off BUT they are also taking a lot of jobs that Americans or legal aliens could get hired for. Plus the fact that most of them don't want/need to learn English. It's mostly not needing it because there are already so many hispanics over here. So what starts happening is that for a lot of jobs you now have to be bilingual to get the job! Or employers prefer their employees to be hispanic because they can communicate with any non-english spanish speaking customers. It's gone so far that there are door-to-door advertisements and billboards COMPLETELY IN SPANISH!!! No English at all!! And THIS is what's pissing American people (including me!) off..
Furthermore, I believe that black people over here are more racist then white people (except certain parts of the Midwest). Everything that happens is all of a sudden a race issue. Yes African-Americans were enslaved many many years ago, but some still believe that white america owes them for that and they actually treat you like garbage. A lady I know works at a special education school with a lot of kids that are black and hispanic. When Obama got elected the black kids told her "finally we are free and can do whatever we want!" and she replied "what are you talking about, you were always free..". Sad to see that some african-american parents still raise their kids like that.
If you ever see a "inter-racial" couple walking together (so one black person and one white), take a look around who is giving them a weird or disgusted look. 99% of the time it's black people.
Live here is harder. Much harder then in NL. Many ups and downs, but more opportunities as well.
I've had my ups and downs. I lived in Hollywood, 5 minutes from Sunset Blvd, going to the best clubs and restaurants in LA, working full-time making good money. I also lived on my friends couch for months, no job and basically not able to support myself if I didn't have the friends that I had..
Don't just wish you were over here because you want to live here for the weather or because you came here on vacation and it looks better then NL, you have to work and fight twice as hard to have the same standard of living that you had back in NL. Ask any immigrant over here.
With all these pros and cons, would I ever go back to NL? No. I like it way too much here. NL is fine, but US is where everything is happening and you actually start appreciating what you have because you work harder to get it.
Anything specific you guys wanna know you can ask me in this topic. Dutch or English doesn't matter
Oefening baart kunst, zullen we maar zeggen!
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