In 2017, I was working an office job in Portland, Oregon, reading Lonely Planet travel guides while I was supposed to be focused on my work. I was getting paid $11.25 an hour, we were barely a year into 45’s presidency, and winter was coming.

I wanted out.

I came across an article by Paris Marx entitled How I Saved $8,000 in Four Months by Moving Abroad. It was about how they had gone on a working holiday to Australia - a place where wages were fair, public transit was widely available, and most importantly for me, it was almost summer.

This was before the arrival of digital nomad visas, and Australia was one of the only places in the world where Americans under the age of 30 could easily get a work visa. And sure enough, the company I worked for had an office in Melbourne and my boss was willing to put in a good word for me. I only had a little time before I aged out of qualifying for the visa, so I put in my application and it was granted on the spot.

A few months later, in November 2017, I landed in Melbourne, with the right to live and work in the country for at least a year.

I never did end up working the office job, because Paris was right: there was a strong economy and plenty of other opportunities. I spent some of the year traveling around the country in a campervan, and another few months subletting a room in Melbourne while volunteering at festivals and working odd jobs.

Soon, I started freelance writing for clients on UpWork, most of whom were based in the U.S. Ironically, this meant I didn’t have to be in Australia for work anymore, and I would have a source of income I could rely on if I moved back to Portland.

But there were other benefits to living in Australia: Melbourne is ranked one of the most livable cities in the world, with access to universal health care, a progressive tax code, and strict gun control. Plus, paying taxes in Australia meant I was exempt from U.S. self-employment taxes and had a reprieve from my student loans.

Initially, my plan was to go back to Portland after six months in Australia. But six months turned into a year, and before long I’d moved in with a partner at their family’s house in the suburbs. This was starting to look like more than a holiday.

At the end of 2018, I applied for a student visa to extend my stay until at least 2020. A year later, my partner and I moved into our own apartment for the first time; and a few months after that, the first cases of Covid-19 arrived in Australia.

The U.S. put out a call for American citizens abroad to come home; instead, I applied for a permanent partner visa.

It was a thing we’d been considering for some time, but both the cost (around $7,000 AUD, plus the optional cost of a migration agent), and the fact that my student visa was still valid, had made it a low priority. Neither of us wanted to get “married,” but we filled out a form with the state of Victoria to register our domestic partnership.

Once we submitted the application, I was essentially trapped in Australia. The Covid-19 lockdowns in Melbourne were serious. At times, we were limited to exercising outdoors for an hour a day, no more than 5 kilometers from our house. During a brief window when cases were low, we needed a permit to travel to another state.

In some ways, this worked out in our favor, because we had all of the documents we needed to prove that our relationship was genuine: a rental agreement, a joint bank account, furniture and grocery purchases, photos of our life together.

I checked message boards obsessively to track the latest visa processing times. First, partner visas were being processed in 5 months, then 7 months, then 13.

For most of 2020, and well into 2021, Australian citizens were prohibited from traveling abroad; temporary residents like me were permitted to leave, but wouldn’t be allowed to return - unless we were in a relationship with an Australian, in which case we would have to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine at our own expense.

It was a complex maze of restrictions that seemed to differ for everyone.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the vaccine rollout had begun, and my friends were beginning to get out and socialize again; Australia hadn’t stockpiled enough vaccines, and we were faced with the prospect of another winter of lockdowns and infections.

For the first time in years, the U.S. seemed like the better place to be. I flew back to Portland in May, and got vaccinated within hours of getting off the plane.

I spent the next few months staying in a friend’s basement while the world slowly opened up. By that point, I was no longer a U.S. resident: I didn’t have an official address, I didn’t qualify for the Oregon Health Plan, and I had to carry around my passport to get into bars because they wouldn’t accept my Australian driver’s license.

I felt comforted by the Australian Medicare card in my wallet, and the knowledge that if anything serious did happen, I had healthcare waiting for me there. In the meantime, I purchased temporary medical insurance in case of emergencies.

At first, I was hopeful that my partner would be able to visit me, but as the Australian vaccine rollout dragged on, that didn’t seem likely. In order to meet the requirements of the partner visa, we had to remain in a genuine relationship for another two years. If we were separated for months at a time, would that jeopardize my residency? We saved records of our calls and messages as proof of our relationship.

Finally, in November, returning residents were no longer required to quarantine; after six months in the U.S., I booked one of the first flights back to Melbourne.
After the lockdowns ended, my partner and I began to travel more. I started petsitting around Australia, mostly as a way to get a break from the city and be closer to outdoor activities. Within months, I’d racked up a handful of reviews and started applying for petsits in Portland. I lined up five, ten, and then a dozen catsits back-to-back.

It was exactly the travel hack I needed: this way, we could keep our apartment in Melbourne, and whenever I visited Portland, I would rely on housesits and home exchanges to avoid having to pay for an Airbnb or maintain a U.S. address.

In 2023, my partner and I spent the whole summer together in Portland. It was tempting to move back for good, but with universal health care nowhere in sight and student loan forgiveness in permanent paralysis, it didn’t seem worth the risk.

We celebrated my partner’s birthday with a party in my best friend’s backyard, trying to make the most of our time here while it lasted.

The next day, I woke up to an email letting me know that my permanent residency had finally been granted: my visa status, my Medicare card, and the right to come and go from Australia would all be valid for the next five years.

Now, I’m mostly free to choose how much time I want to spend in each country. I need to spend at least 730 days living in Australia every five years in order to maintain my residency. And I have to limit my time in the U.S. in order to qualify for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion as a bona fide Australian resident.

Since 2021, I’ve spent part of the year in each country, mostly in line with the seasons, so I haven’t had a full winter since that first Covid lockdown in 2020.

I recently got an email from my migration agent telling me that based on their records, I might be eligible for Australian citizenship as long as I met the travel requirements: no more than 12 months outside of the country in the past four years, and no more than three months abroad in the last 12 months. Of course, I don’t qualify.

For now, there’s no incentive for me to gain Australian citizenship: it would mean limiting the amount of time I can spend with my family and friends in the U.S., at least for the next four years. The main benefit would be to get an Australian passport.

I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege, and that for people who have a disability, can’t work remotely, or don’t travel on a U.S. passport, the calculations are different, and hoops are exponentially harder to jump through. But that’s the point: it shouldn’t be this hard for anyone, and our immigration policies need to evolve to accommodate a broader range of circumstances.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep my options open, and do what I can to help other people establish their own forms of residency in an increasingly chaotic world.

Photo credit: Josh Hild