Guardian where should i emigrate

I wanted to move to a place where people go out on the streets and protest in their thousands, asking for more refugees. At the end of October last year, a woman was punched on a London train in the rush hour for speaking Spanish on her phone. It was barely reported in the UK, but in Barcelona it was headline news. It was the first thing people asked me about when I arrived.

The classic image of British people in Spain is of them walking around topless, shouting English, with noisy wheelie bags and cans of beer. We see the rest of the world as a place to go on holiday for a week or two. In Germany, everyone grows up learning English — people border-hop, live in other countries and embrace a European identity.

It saddens me to think that young people growing up in the UK now may never experience that. Will I ever return to the UK? The moment I stepped on to that one-way plane, I felt huge relief. Emma Bell, 28, worked in London as a cancer researcher. She mov ed to Toronto, Canada, at the end of January.

A bunch of my friends set up a Facebook group about moving to Berlin after the vote. There are plenty of opportunities there in fintech [financial technology], but not for the type of cancer research I do. So I started looking for postdoctoral positions in other countries. Ultimately, Toronto pipped Sweden to the post. The main things I worried about were access to funding, being able to ship chemical samples to mainland Europe and what would happen to my colleagues.

Roughly a third are EU citizens. I empathise with people who are stockpiling their medications in the UK; I need antidepressants to function, myself. I grew up in Hertfordshire and was usually the only non-white person in the room. Moving to London for university was a revelation. Brexit has made me look at my country differently. I always wore a poppy for Remembrance Day and switched to a white one a few years ago. You could see it in my profile picture on the dating site OK Cupid and the comments I got were unbelievable.

It does feel as if the language used has become more hostile. Maybe the distance will help me process those feelings. The logistical nightmare that Brexit is going to be, both for individuals and the field in which I work, is one thing. Each of the destination countries has particular needs for skilled workers. Where could you be most useful? Engineering and technical skills, particularly in the mining and energy sectors.

Which language or languages are you going to speak? Or Welsh in isolated pockets, but there may not be jobs in the Welsh-speaking areas. Portuguese with some Swahili and Bantu, but for professional purposes mostly Portuguese. Submit Reset. Topics World news Europa Migration and development quizzes. Reuse this content. Overall, the number of people leaving the UK has been falling — in the first few years of the 21st century it was close to , a year and peaked at , in In it dropped to , Despite that, the most popular destinations have not changed much over the past 20 years, although there has been some ebb and flow near the top.

Over that period Australia has always attracted the highest number of those taking flight from the UK, and the number has been growing — from 48, in to 64, in The US was overtaken by Spain as the next most popular place to go in , but has now reclaimed second place. In the top 10 destinations according to the IPS included the Netherlands and Japan; in Switzerland and Belgium were on the list. The changes are likely to reflect fluctuations in the destination countries' economies and labour markets.

Perhaps surprisingly, the impact of the state of the UK job market on emigration is such that the number of people leaving the country falls when unemployment is high: you need some money behind you to take off in search of work. It is hard to get exact figures for how many UK citizens now live overseas — the Home Office report suggests the total is 4.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office does not have its own figures, and the World Bank quotes from research done in by Sussex University. The Department of Work and Pensions knows how many people are claiming the UK state pension in each country, but pensioners make up a small fraction of emigrants each year.

The Home Office reckons between 4, and 8, retired Brits leave the country annually, down from a peak of 22, in A top 10 produced by the Institute of Public Policy Research is the most widely referenced guide to where people end up when they wave goodbye to the UK.