Personally my love is for Eastern & Central Europe. I am actively looking for property in Poland. The problem is, believe it or not, it is very hard to become a Polish citizen. And they have some strict laws about non-citizens owning land.
IMHO the new additions to the EU will be the most exciting place to live over the next 10 years. Their economies will prosper and the standard of living will skyrocket; much like what happened in "old Europe" in the late '50s. Just my 0,02 USD.
Pax Night and day you can find me Flogging the Simian
SoftWare.
My understanding is that this has been superceded by the new immigration act as of 1 Jan 2005, which basically says that foreign professionals are welcome to seek employment if they work in a profession in which a shortage exists, i.e. do not displace any native or EU citizen. Consequently, no special rules exist any longer for individual occupational groups. source/xlation m.o.
My wife is in IT, and we know a lot of German software people who are out of work.
I don't mean to say that it is impossible (especially if you have a prospective employer in your corner), but it's not as easy as it used to be. "Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut
This is also bad news for my younger brother who planned to do that if a draft was started in the US again.
Scheiße!
Bucharest is a big modern city with anything you and your wife could ever possible want, and hordes of well-trained computer programmers looking for work. You could do a lot worse!
Let me tell you a little secret about being American and living abroad - the US gov't has no idea where you live. The only gov't who cares is the host country. And being a permanent resident is ten thousand times easier than becoming a citizen.
If you really feel that paranoid, look at the Vienna Agreements and the mutual extradiction treaties. I promise you nobody has ever been deported solely to obey some kind of draft requirement. Secondly, the draft gets its list from the Social Services board and with your son being 13 I don't think he's registered yet.
You need to fly that family of yours to Europe for a while and let your wife and kids see what it's like here.
One thing re the UK. They don't tend to pay technical people squat. Might be better at the PHD level, but the average engineer is poorly paid vs the US, France or Germany. In UK parlance a repairman is an "engineer" and they pay accordingly.
How difficult is it to become an Irish citzen?
I suspect you'll have an easier time in Eire if you have Irish ancestors. Google around. There are good sites on Italian rules/regs so prob some on Eire as well.
To take a local example, my niece's partner has a PhD in Control Engineering from a UK university and is a senior software engineer for an embedded controls company.
The one major problem in the UK is where. Rather like in the USA, the areas with the best jobs have the highest housing costs. Buying a house in the Cambridge area for example will, for a family with a couple of kids, cost anything from £200k to £800k.
The houses are also very different to the US, with smaller plots, area and room size.
If you want to check out houses try Primelocation Eats cheroots and leaves.
I moved to Germany knowing NO German (I was already fluent in French, though). I could hold a functional conversation after 4 months. By the end of the 2nd year, I was fluent. By the end of the 3rd year, I could speak rather creatively/poetically -- not just functionally.
The caveats that Soj mentions are so true, though. Although I believe it's the second year in country that you want to kill everyone you meet. First year, everything's kinda new and exciting. By the second year, all you want is a burrito/slice/collards and you keep wishing for the relative efficiency of the Dept of Motor Vehicles. Being away from friends and especially family is really hard, though.
By the third year -- you've made some long-term friends, you've started forgetting the English words for things ("fork" and "knife" always flummoxed me when I went back to visit the 'rents), and you start to get nervous if you're back in the States for too long.
Personally, I'd dig on moving to Eastern Europe at some point -- but right now the goal is either Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong or Seoul. Because it's time to learn another language! Just another science harpy.
as a tip -- if you managed to learn Esperanto, you've already mastered the hard part -- training your brain to pick out linguistic patterns. It really is a process, like writing code.
It's the compiling that's a bitch. ;-) Just another science harpy.
