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Entry tags:	america, belief, economy, irrationality, life, location, poll, religion, romania, usa

Emigrating from Romania to the USA - Why?
One of the times when you know you have to blog about something, is when it becomes an FAQ. Such has become a question often addressed to me:

Why did you leave Romania, and what made you come to the US?

I started to want to leave Romania as a teenager, and initially for rather frivolous reasons: I wanted to live in an English-speaking country with a nice climate (I hated the very cold winters in Romania) and a decent economy and relatively stable political/social situation. The second criterion ruled out UK and Canada, and the third ruled out South Africa. Australia and the US were the only destinations left.

As time passed, and as I started to become more aware of the bleak Romanian reality, and more hindered by it, the reasons matured as well. By the time I entered college, my top concerns were education and employment. At both, Romania sucked.

I was seeking a computer science education (not a remote cousin like mathematics or electrical engineering). At the time (1998), only one university in Romania was offering a CS curriculum, and it wasn't located in my city. If I were to leave home, I might as well move to another country. I also wanted a decently paid programmer job. At the time, Romania's GDP per capita fluctuated around $1800.

Another large problem with Romania was its pervasive underground economy, powered by the ubiquitous bribe. You may have various strong Mafias in the US, but as a normal resident, you don't really have to bribe anyone. Not quite so in Romania. Corruption is ripe, from the top to the very nobody's of the society. I had to bribe professors, city officials, doctors, police officers, because that was the unwritten but implacable law of the land. In my city, well-known murderers were flaunting their red Ferraris because they had connections in all the right places. Drank and drove and seriously injured someone? You can walk away free if you "talk" with the judge.

In numbers, Romania's Corruption Perception Index hovered around 70%. For comparison, the index for US is around 30% and Denmark's is 5%.

Next: the health system. My father is a medical doctor, so I had a direct look at the medical system. Understaffed, underfunded, technologically outdated. Coupled with all the other problems of life, this lead to a life expectancy at birth for males of 68 years, and that is the 2007 estimate.

As I became an atheist around 2002, I realized that statistics (over 90% of Romanians believe in God - the worst situation in Europe) were again very tangible. My family, friends and significant other were... not particularly proud of me. And don't get me started on how proud I am of their fundamentalist beliefs, or on how villagers always have money to build a new church but never a new levee, and get flooded systematically each spring.

Other problems with Romania: the communist mentality is very much alive. People expect to be given, then complain. Few have entrepreneurial spirit, and capitalism is scorned. If one litters the street, nobody else says anything. And when the streets are already quite dirty, you don't feel as out of place as in, say Austria, if you throw your cigarette butt on the pavement. (Yes, smoking is a national sport).

Romania also suffers from a cultural shock of rural dwellers suddenly thrown into cities by the large industrialization wave of the 60's. In what you'd call cities (population over 200,000; many 10-story apartment buildings etc.), folks are still raising pigs and hens in their balconies. Cities are ripe with stray dogs and cats abandoned once owners switched from the "house+backyard" lifestyle to the urban apartment block habitat. Sheep and cows on the green space between street lanes are a picturesque but not uncommon sight. Flocks even made it on one of the two freeways in Romania:

And then there are the little things

Neighbors upstairs not flushing the toilet the entire day to save on water costs. People so poor they climb linden trees on the city's sidewalk to harvest the flowers, but so... moronic that they didn't harvest the flowers nicely; no, they broke the branches and threw them to the ground, leaving behind mercilessly mutilated trees.

Gypsies making you feel insecure walking the street after dark. Child beggars. Sewers without covers (a man once fell into one and died because of 4th degree burns from the hot water carried by the leaking pipes underneath).

Low Internet penetration. Balkan and bazaar mentality. Weather that makes you hate going out of the house half a year. Parvenus galore.

And then, there is hope

In the last 4 years, Romania has made some really impressive strides, including joining the European Union:

• the Corruption Perception Index has improved by ~30%
• The currency has been among the world's top five performing currencies for much of the past two years. [bloomberg]
• Romanian GDP will double by 2011. Romania is one of the most stable and prosperous states of Central, Eastern and South Europe. [Wikipedia]
• Based on the fact that Bucharest produces around 21% of Romanian GDP for a population of around 2 million, the GDP (PPP) per capita of the city would be US$30,057.

In fact, the Wikipedia article on the Economy of Romania can almost make one forget the grim reality of 23% of Romanians living on under $4 a day. And when your grandmother officially lives on $3.30 a day, it ceases to be just a statistic.

Will you go back?

To visit? Sure. Romania is a great touristic destination.
To remain there? No.

Why didn't you stay in Romania, to help your country?

Because I have no duty to do so; and because I may be able to help it better from here. I have investments in Romania and I'm in the process of starting up a consumer reviews site focused on Romanian products and services.

Do you feel "Romanian"?

Not really. If I tell you I'm from Romania and you say "Oh, Budapest, right...", I won't be offended. The country in which chance had me born is not of so much importance to me. The country in which I choose to live, is.

How happy are you with the US?

"It's OK". The US is still a democratic republic and still has a solid economy, but both are eroding at alarming rates, together with the state of education. To quote a slightly amusing but deeply troubling 2007 Harris Poll:

That very large majorities of the American public believe in God, miracles, the survival of the soul after death, heaven, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Birth will come as no great surprise. What may be more surprising is that substantial minorities believe in ghosts, UFOs, witches, astrology, and reincarnation – the belief that they themselves were once another people. Majorities of about two-thirds of all adults believe in hell and the devil, but hardly anybody expects that they will go to hell themselves. For more information, you can listen to this highly entertaining KQED talk show (50 minutes) with (among others) Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason".

Other things that go worse are the slow transformation of US into a surveillance society, and, according to some authors, into a fascist state (Naomi Wolf - The End of America). As a person who stands up for the rights to privacy and free speech, recent events like a federal judge ordering the disabling of Wikileaks.org are troubling.

And I could go on a lot with what I think is going wrong with the US. Keep an eye on the blog.

If not the US, then where?

Australia.
But I haven't decided against the US yet. Let's see how things evolve after the elections; and after all, I do live (by choice) in the arguably best part of the US - California.