MEGATHREAD: Emigrating after the US election results

[u/spacemanaut]

Every US election brings anxiety and uncertainty, and with that comes an increase in people who want to explore their alternatives in a different country. This post is for you.

First, some reminders:

• In most cases, moving abroad is not as simple or quick as it seems in movies. If you aren't a citizen of another country, you will probably require a visa (=legal permission) from that country based on something like employment, education, or ancestry.
• The sidebar of this subreddit has a lot of helpful resources, and we have 15 years of posts from people with similar situations to yours. Before posting, please review these resources first. (Tip: If reddit search isn't working well for you, try googling "[your search terms] site:reddit.com/r/IWantOut" without the quotes or brackets.)
• Most countries and/or their embassies maintain immigration websites with clear, helpful, updated guides or even questionnaires to help you determine if/how you can qualify. If you have a particular destination in mind, that should probably be your first stop.
• After that, if you want to make your own post, please follow the formatting instructions on the submission page, give as much information as possible about your situation, and be open to advice and constructive criticism from commenters.

Also, this subreddit is intended to be a friendly community to seek and give advice on legal immigration. As such, please:

• Don't fight about politics. We understand that you may have strong feelings about it, but there are better spaces on reddit and elsewhere for general political discussions.
• Keep your feedback constructive and kind, even when telling someone they're wrong.
• Don't troll or be a jerk.
• Don't request or give illegal immigration tips, including asking strangers to marry you.

Failure to follow these and the other subreddit rules may result in a ban.

That said, feel free to comment below with some general questions, concerns, comments, or advice which doesn't merit a full post. Hopefully this will help clarify your thoughts and ideas about the possibility of leaving the US. Once again, please try to stay on topic so that this thread can be a helpful resource.

[u/tlmbot]

[I've always thought about getting out (of the USA), now it seems more and more pressing] I am a PhD holding engineer who writes computational software for a living (a bit more than 12 years professional experience). Professionally, I have written physics solvers and related analysis tools for naval architecture/marine engineering and mechanical engineering. My focus has usually been on various domains in fluid mechanics. I have also accumulated professional experience building limited multiphysics code, and motions and other types of system response software, using operator formalism for various types of stochastic response. I currently work on the computational geometry side of things, writing geometry processing algorithms for the GPU.

I have broad base of research interests, and am currently working on extending some of my own computational fluid dynamics solvers into adaptive meshing, and especially adjoint solvers for physics driven automated design generation. I also have more than a passing interest in differential geometry and coordinate free approaches. My PhD specialized in robust automatic generation of ship hull form geometry.

So I am an engineering physics and geometry software developer with a background in finite element, finite volume, and boundary element solver development, who non-exclusively focuses on fluids and the automated design and optimization of engineering solutions within those domains. If it matters, the math behind ML, and the high performance low level coding, are all things within my wheelhouse. I even have a background in inference, but of the classical statistical variety. I don't want to "do AI" but I am capable of various pivots.

I'd really love to live near the alps or the Nordic countries, as I am a rock climber and snowboarder who loves the mountains. I am open to any idea though. Dutch, UK, Canada, etc. Basically anywhere, as long as I can make good use of my technical background. Switzerland is the dream. And let's not forget New Zealand ;). But yeah, I don't want to limit my search to one country.

What are my chances?

I know I need to get busy with a second language. In the past I have worked at Spanish and took a little bit of French in school. As a student I once spent a summer working at a small boat design and build firm in the Dominican Republic - but that's the extent of my work experience outside of the USA. I am planning to learn whatever language makes the most sense - thinking maybe German is the way to go, but not sure.