http://www.escapeartist.com/EFAM_Special_Supplement/Special_Supplement.htmlThe US media is now admitting that more people are currently leaving the United States of America than at any time in US history. Those familiar with this website can probably surmise that I am not very much surprised by this admission - - I did however have an experience the day before yesterday that very much surprised me.
I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe here in Buenos Aires enjoying a lunch with some friends when a young lady walked up to the table and said, 'You're Roger Gallo, aren't you?'
I confessed that I was and asked how she knew. She replied that she recognized me from my photograph on the website, and that EscapeArtist.com is the 'in' website on campus at Chapel Hill. She explained that she was from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she was in Argentina to buy an organic farm.
I was dumbfounded. Chapel Hill, a college with high academic standards, has been involved in the process of preparing its students for law, medicine and communications since 1795. It was the first public university in the United States to open its doors and the only one to graduate students in the eighteenth century.
Why would some of America's best and brightest students from one of America's oldest and most respected universities be looking at a website that focused on international relocation? ...and then it came to me. The students were trying to figure out how to move overseas after their graduation. Has it come to that, I asked myself, already convinced that indeed, it has.
Why's Everybody leavin' town?
Having a front row seat to what is an unprecedented relocation out of the United States means that I get frequent requests for interviews from the media. (They assume that I am the authority on the subject, and in view of the fact that lovely college girls come up to me at sidewalk cafes and tell me what a genius I am, I am not going to reject any form of flattery, including that of being considered the worlds foremost authority on something) In the past few months I've been interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, among others. The impetus for these interviews was the reelection of George W. Bush and his administration. Would there be a large exodus of Americans from the United States if Bush is reelected, they wanted to know, this prior to the election. When the election came and went I was again contacted - they now wanted to know how many Americans were moving overseas and where they were going - - some of the reporters who asked these questions personally confessed that they too were now thinking of relocating out of the USA.