“Being able to immigrate to another country ever. It's very hard. And it's very complicated. And, as an American, I think we just often don't have any concept of it.” - Laura Roeder

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In this conversation:

Laura Roeder:
Laura's Company: Paperbell
Laura on Twitter: @lkr

Brian Casel:

Brian’s company, ZipMessage

Brian on Twitter: @casjam

Thanks to ZipMessage

ZipMessage (today’s sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.


Quotes from this episode:

Quote 1:

Laura: Yeah. It's like once we got here, we just loved it. You know, sometimes a place clicks and you're like, okay, this is. This is the place for us. I mean, I love not living in America.

And, you know, Brighton was just an hour south of London. So you can still go to London for events and theater and stuff like that. But Brighton is pretty small, like when you. What I love is if I meet someone in Brighton, I can walk to their house. It's just like it's dense. It's not that big. It's on the seafront, but it's big enough that there's still tons of, like, shops and restaurants and stuff like that.

It's known as a kind of, like, creative place Yeah.

Brian: Yeah. Super cool. We did, like, around the country, Airbnb thing. We had our first, uh, our second. We were pregnant, like, on our way back. We were like, All right, now we have No. Two. Looks like took it back to Connecticut, but we were sort of like, toying with the idea of, like, settling somewhere else. Maybe Austin and maybe Colorado.

We just came back here because, my parents are here and having, like, the local babysitter is so huge.

Laura: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean, what once you have kids, you understand why everyone just, like, moves back to their parents?

Brian: Yeah, exactly.

Quote 2:

Brian: I was going to ask about the... This might be super boring but I like the process of moving abroad. I mean, I guess your husband is... is a citizen. Yeah.

Laura: Yeah.

Brian: And like, getting the visa and everything was like, I probably not. I mean, you don't need a visa.

Laura: But. Oh, you are so wrong. It is so hard. So, yeah, I had no idea. I had no idea about this before. A lot of people think that you just, like, marry someone from another country, and then you can just go to their country. That is 0% of how it works. That's not how it works at all. I thought that, too.

So one I mean, so you can so if you marry someone from the UK, you can apply to be a British citizen. It's an extremely expensive process. It's an extremely long process. You're not... The way it's designed is actually to have you living in separate countries like we ended up traveling, so we didn't have to do that. But it's like, what?

Like, so it's designed that one person has to be there already because the person who's the sponsor has to prove that they can provide an income for the other person, which is also crazy. So like if one of you were a stay-at-home parent, like women often are, right? Like, so if the mom was the British one and you had a baby and the, you know, the guy was the income earner, that wouldn't work, they'd be like, Nope, too bad for you.

Like Mom's mum's going to get a job and has to show the W-2 earnings. And that's if you're from like a quote-unquote good country that they like. There are lots of countries, so they're just like, no, we don't like the likes of you. We're not going to let you come or like, God forbid, you have some sort of criminal history.

Like if you sold marijuana when you were 20, good luck being able to immigrate to another country ever. It's very hard and it isn't very easy. And yeah, as an American, I think we just often don't have any concept of it.

Quote 3:

Laura: In America. Schools have started starting really early in the morning. Does your kid's school do that?

Brian: They're in kindergarten and then second grade, and they're going to school around the bus, picking them up at like 7:40 a.m.

Laura: Yeah, that's so, so 7:40. So, so many kids in America just don't get enough sleep. It's just like literally impossible. The math doesn't work out. I mean, maybe when they're little, they can, but not if they're older and they have to be off the bus, you know, at seven 40. Like, if you get up at seven, it's like a mad dash.

Brian: I would imagine it. It's crazy sleeping, though. I mean, they're like sleeping by like 8:30 p.m. So they're getting like 11 almost twice sleep sometimes. But like crazy. I mean, what else about like kids? Well, I guess they're really like growing that have a UK accent. So like they, they, I was going to ask about like being like a foreigner in a country as a, as a child, right?

Like I had a friend who had moved to France but like the kids were you know, they grew up part of their lives in America. Anything like that sort of like come into play with was like growing up and.

Laura: Well, my kids are not foreigners. I am. Yeah. You know, but they don't really have any kind of identity like that, especially of course with the language being the same. So they're not, of course, having to learn a new language or speak a new language. I did realize the other day that they'll have British accents as adults, which kind of blew my mind like I'm used to it now.

Then I was imagining my daughter being like, 25, but I'm like, Oh, she's just going to be like a full-blown English person, which does seem a little bit funny to me. But I mean, the language thing makes it so much easier. It's and this is another thing Americans just don't realize, like, learning another language to the level where you can have friends in that language is literally like a ten-year process.

There's a huge difference between being able to go to a shop and having friends that you're like making jokes and cultural references. I mean, even here a lot of things are called different things. And just little things like especially at school, they're like, oh, we're having a tombola, what is a tombola? And then they said, Oh, you bring a bottle.

And I was like, Of alcohol, like, I actually I'm still not sure because you bring a bottle of something and it's I think it can be like shower gel or something. And then you like when a bottle. But I'm like, can it be alcohol or is that in poor taste? I don't know. But there's, yeah, there's just a lot of little things like that that like, I'll have to text someone and be like, explain to me how this works.