I was recently on a group hike with a university club, and an Austrian exchange student kept talking about how good life in Austria is. He attends university for free, lives in a vibrant city with great public transit, and with affordable housing.

My city has unaffordable housing, shit transit, and an inept local government. We are staking our future on oil prices constantly going up. The last time oil prices dipped was catastrophic, with mass layoffs and unemployment in nearly every sector.

On top of this we are being hit extra hard by climate change. Last summer I couldn't go outside because of wildfire smoke, and this year is going to be even worse. Every year there's less and less water, to the point where year round drought seems like an inevitability. Our politicians are climate change deniers. The people who elect them couldn't care less, and cry about any measures taken to mitigate it's effects.

I don't want to be stuck paying $2000 a month for a studio apartment as the climate around me slowly degrades, and my politicians try their best to turn us into America.

A sizeable fraction of the students I've talked to about this has or is playing around with the idea of leaving. Austria is just the first country that came to mind, but I would take almost any EU country if the opportunity was offered.