So You’re in Exile
“So you’re in exile.”
I started to argue with Ivan, but he insisted.
“No, you are. You’ve both lost your jobs for political reasons and you left your home.”
Ivan and I hadn’t spoken in months, probably since I visited him in Serbia over the summer, and it was good to hear from him despite my questionable German internet connection adding delay to our WhatsApp call. Ivan is the father in a Serbian family with whom I lived fifteen years ago.
I hadn’t put it to myself in such stark terms. But he was right. I lost my job at a USAID implementing partner in February 2025, and my now-wife, Sam, lost hers at the US Institute of Peace in March. At one stroke, nearly the entire US-backed international development sector was wiped out, and with it our careers. In many ways we got off light: those who would suffer most from this decision would be the millions of people across the world at risk of dying from malnutrition or preventable disease because of the defunding of US assistance.
But there we were, our own lives upended. Just months before we were fired, we had become engaged; just days before I lost my job, we had moved in together. The upheaval put forward-looking plans on standby. We applied to new jobs in the Washington, DC, area, but we were competing with the ten thousand or so other federal employees and contractors in our situation for the same several dozen jobs.
We were also afraid. In the lead-up to the raid on Sam’s workplace, FBI agents visited the homes of several of her coworkers in what looked like an attempt to intimidate and gain access to the organization’s electronic systems and its physical office. While Sam wasn’t a logical next target, she did not feel safe.
I also had more abstract fears. My studies and career had focused on semi-authoritarian, authoritarian, and postconflict countries, mostly in Southeast Europe. I had studied how repressive political systems come to power and stay in power. We were reading column after column of opinion writers telling us why the United States is different, why our institutions would save us. But my comparative experience wouldn’t let me believe that, and as law firms and universities and journalists and Congress fell in line, America started feeling less and less exceptional.
In the months after we lost our jobs, Sam sent off applications to PhD programs in Frankfurt and Basel, master’s programs in cities we had never heard of. She got the rejections we expected until one day she got an acceptance. Neither of us knew much about Bonn, Germany; I had once read a John Le Carré novel that took place there, but neither of us could even place it on a map. Yet somehow Sam had been accepted to a master’s program there, taught in English, and tuition-free.
When Sam got her acceptance email, we were stunned. We had become so used to rejections that suddenly being offered an opportunity was novel. Sam showed me the email and asked, “What do we do?” My answer was immediate, and instinctive: we go. I would take German classes for the first year, and we would see what happened next. We ran our budget estimates—if we took all our savings, everything we had saved up for a house and for a family together, that would cover us for long enough. It would be a gamble, but somehow it felt like less risky than staying in Washington.
In the two months between Sam’s acceptance date and her matriculation date, we had lots to do. While she and I had been engaged for most of a year, we had had to put our wedding plans on hold. Now there was no reason to wait. Sam was accepted into the program on a Tuesday; we went to the courthouse the following Monday. Our DC-area friends met up with us at a bar that evening to congratulate us on the two big life events, our marriage and our decision to move. Our friends were universally supportive, though sadness lingered in the background—sadness over the fact that we and so many of our friends had lost our jobs, and that leaving DC and leaving the country felt like the right decision for us.
Sam and I had both previously lived outside of the US. I had lived in Serbia with families like Ivan’s, and later in Turkey with another homestay family. Sam had studied abroad in France. We had both learned foreign languages before—me Serbian and Turkish, her French. We had both traveled extensively for work, school, and fun. Sam had even spent a month in Berlin, around a decade ago, although I had never stepped foot in Germany. But our previous travels were always for limited terms. We had been tourists, students, and occasionally business travelers—travelers with eventual return tickets. This time we weren’t sure how long we would stay.
That we would end up in Germany, and not, say, France, was not an accident. Sam had done extensive research and found that Germany has by far the most generous visa and residence options for people in our situation. The spouses of foreign graduate students in the US are not allowed to work; by comparison, here in Germany, I have the right to work a full-time job while my wife studies. With hard work, some luck, and a job offer, we should be able to convert our status from student-and-dependent to something longer-term. We calculated that if we were going to cross an ocean, to go East and seek a new life, we wanted to be able to stay if we liked. Or if we needed to.
How long will we stay here? One day, just weeks into the start of my German classes, we had a substitute teacher who asked us a number of warm-up questions, including that one. The question ended up being far beyond our level. I didn’t have enough German to answer—to say “that depends.” I didn’t have command of the conditional—“If the political situation back home changes . . .”—or the counterfactual—“If we hadn’t lost our jobs . . .”—or even the passive—“As long as we are allowed.”
How long will we stay here? That’s the question of many an émigré. How long can Napoleon stay in power? How about the Bolsheviks? How long before the nonsense in Yugoslavia blows over? Surely they all hoped, like we do, that things would go back to normal. Surely they suspected, like we do, that they never would.
Some of the people we meet understand our situation. My language teachers generally get it—they follow the news and, if they think we are overreacting, they keep to themselves. One of my teachers is a history buff; he indulges me as I reach for the German translations of words like “coup attempt” and “concentration camps.” Some people that I meet can be as direct as my Serbian homestay dad Ivan was—“So you’re in exile.” I don’t argue with them anymore.
Other people we meet don’t really understand why we’ve come here. The twenty-year-old barista of Moroccan-Spanish origin who runs the coffee stand by my language school doesn’t. Through his minimal English and my (at the time) minimal German, he expressed his disbelief at my move to Bonn: “For me, America is like, wow!”
The dream of and hope for what America can be is still a powerful story here and across much of the world. The stories are not just based on US media dominance and tenacious stereotypes. When I meet new German acquaintances, sometimes they speak glowingly about the time they spent a month on a work assignment in Ohio, or when they spent a semester on a high school exchange program in West Virginia (two counties away from where Sam grew up), or the several years they hosted American high school students here in Bonn on their own exchanges.
In Sam’s master’s program, too, the memory of what the US once meant for Europe sometimes outweighs current events. Her professors study European security policy and NATO, and they come bearing long resumes that weave in and out of the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry. After over seven decades of German membership in NATO, it is hard for them to fully understand what the current administration’s foreign policy could mean for Germany and for Europe, even when the president’s own National Security Strategy spells it out.
Sometimes our move feels like madness. We moved half a world away, to a land that I had never stepped foot in, on something between a plan and a whim. But it feels like something different from how staying in DC would have felt: it feels like progress. Within our first year here, Sam will have finished most of her master’s program, and I will have learned enough German to study or work—I already have a German-speaking job at a nearby café. We are starting to make friends beyond our fellow students.
Looking back at the US can seem like madness, too, and that madness seems like regress. We are somewhat removed from it: we see it only through our screens, darkly, no longer face-to-face. But no one is ever fully disconnected from their family, friends, and homeland, and what we see from back home does not encourage a sense of security and normalcy.
As immigrants, my wife and I are not so alone here. Our neighborhood grocery store is a one-floor Tower of Babel; we hear Turkish, Serbian or Bosnian, Albanian, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish, French, Dutch, and other languages I can’t identify. Some fellow immigrants tell me explicitly that they are here for political reasons—they are against Turkish President Erdogan or Hungarian ex-Prime Minister Orban, or they are refugees from Syria or Ukraine or further. Others are here in the hope of better education, better jobs, or at least the same jobs with better pay, than they can get in their homelands. Others still are here just because they can be—they are citizens of the European Union and have chosen to vacation, study, or move to Germany for their own idiosyncratic reasons.
Some of these reasons overlap somewhat with our own motives for coming here, but only somewhat. We will probably never make as much money here as we did in Washington, but with the destruction of our DC employment sector, we cannot have our careers there either. We certainly are not refugees; there are legal definitions for that term and we don’t meet them. We can come and go freely between the US and Germany.
In our previous careers in international development, Sam and I had met people we considered real exiles. Afghans, Russians, Turks, Belarusians, Venezuelans, South Sudanese, Uyghurs, Hongkongers, other people who had stood up to the governments of their homelands and could not go home, at least not safely. I had instinctively argued with Ivan, my Serbian homestay dad, when he asserted that we were in exile because it felt wrong to conflate our situation with theirs. Maybe it was also out of hubris: maybe I thought that an American doesn’t—can’t—“go into exile.” Nonetheless, here we are.