Thoughts on being an immigrant

There is no place like home

I first moved to live outside Brazil on the 23rd of December, 2005. I had gotten a job at Google Switzerland, and parted my hometown to a new life in a country and a city I had not even visited once before.

I left Brazil with 80 Euros in my pocket, and no functioning credit cards, because I was deep deep in financial debt. A few months before I had received my job offer, I met a woman, Katia, in the middle of the Amazon Rain Forest. She was on vacation there with her Swiss husband, and I was also on vacation there (I had a paid trip to speak at a conference, and I decided to extend by a few days and go visit the Rain Forest because who knows when I would have that opportunity again).

Katia, that almost stranger, went to pick me up at the airport, and brought me to her house to spend the weekend. During this weekend, I told her how Lufthansa had lost my luggage, and because of that, I had no clothes to wear to go to work in that winter weather, and I had to spend my 80 Euros buying some clothes. I had no idea when my first salary would be paid, and I had no cash until then. Katia helped me with some money.

On Sunday evening she dropped me at my corporate housing, and on Monday morning I looked at a paper map (there were no smart phones back then!), left my corporate housing to then realize I had no idea where to go. I walked around a bit and read the street signs in German (a language I did not speak), but I could not figure out directions to get to the office. I went back to the corporate apartment, got in bed wearing all my clothes, and cried for good 30 minutes: what the hell had I done with my life.

Eventually I made it to the office, and started to learn what living in Switzerland meant: what were my new responsibilities, how health worked, how public transportation worked, how to rent an apartment (without money, in particular).

Some people refused to show me their apartments, because I was a single Brazilian woman. Others were a bit nicer. A lot of people refused to speak English to me. I heard “no” quite a lot.

Eventually things got sorted out, and I got into my job at Google and felt productive, but I always had this pressure in the back of my mind that if I lost that job, that also meant leaving this brand new life and going back to Brazil. My visa was sponsored by Google, and who knows if I would find someone else to sponsor my visa if I lost that job.

One of the things not a lot of people realize about being an immigrant is that your status (meaning, right to live somewhere) is tied to your employment status. If you lose your job, you lose the right to live where you live, and that can have a pretty huge impact on your life.

On one hand, at that point I already had the impression I had hit the peak of my career because I was working at Google and therefore had no much to loose, on the other hand that gave me also a feeling of not being there permanently. It also added a lot more pressure to my then 23 years old self on performing well at my job.

Life went on, and in 2012 I decided to leave Google to join then Facebook (now Meta). My end goal, and offer, was to work in the United States, but in order to get there, I would need to go through a lengthy visa application process, so they decided to do it in two steps: they applied for a visa for me to live in Ireland, and in parallel also to a H1B visa to move to the United States.

Again, my status in Ireland, and then in the United States depended on being employed. More specifically, it depended on being employed by Facebook. It was not until 2015 when I had my Italian citizenship recognised, that I gained the right (which is an immense privilege) of choosing to live outside of Brazil, independent of who employed me. The catch here is that an European Union citizenship gives you the right to live in Europe. At that point I was in the United States, and my Green Card only showed up in 2017.

I remember the day I got my Green Card. I remember even having this feeling that I should change jobs, just to exercise this important freedom I had just gained. I didn’t do it, of course, but the thought was there. It was like I could own my destiny again.

Later on in 2019 when Mark and I decided to leave the United States and live in Switzerland, we could only do that because we both had European citizenship (which he no longer has because of Brexit, and now depends on my status to be able to live in Switzerland).

In over 17 years living abroad (8 of them as an European citizen), I have seen many people have their lives turned upside down because of sudden loss of status. Families with kids, single people, you name the configuration. In the US if you’re living in a L1 visa, you have a few days to leave the country when you lose your job. You cannot get another job with another company and continue to live there. You must leave the country. It is a level of discomfort and uncertainty that anyone who considers living outside of their home country should think carefully about. Not everyone has the appetite for this type of rollercoaster.

Looking back, I think this uncertainty and pressure built upon my impostor syndrome to turn me into someone who worked extremely hard, and also someone that had their personality mostly defined by their professional status. In 2019 when I left the corporate world to start a sabbatical, I had this immense fear of losing myself, losing my identity, and of course being forgotten by the industry. Who would I be then?

Shortly after I jumped in this abyss of identity crisis, I became a mother. I guess that worked out well as an intense character building exercise.

Living abroad was the most transformative experience of my life of course because of my professional circumstances, but also because of those struggles people rarely talk about.

It is not all flowers, but it comes with the upside of living in a beginner mentality which I think is a great life skill. Living in a new country means learning everything you took for granted from scratch, and opening yourself up for new ways of doing things and new society norms.

You give up on a lot too, including sometimes the given comfort that those who choose to live in their home countries have: the comfort of knowing that, no matter what happens to your job, you can call the place where you live home.