Why would anyone choose to live in the US any more? If you are not fleeing desperate circumstances (and Brexit does not yet qualify), why would you willingly make the US your home?

I have been asking myself this a lot lately. I was born in London and I have a British passport, but I have been living in New York City for seven years. I love New York. However, the city has a fatal flaw: it is in the US. And the US, you may have noticed, has become terrifyingly totalitarian. It is starting to feel unethical to be an expat here. After all, it does not matter how much you #Resist – there is no getting past the fact that electing to live in the US means paying taxes to Donald Trump’s administration. It means helping to fund a government that is ripping children detained at the border from their parents and placing them in cages. It means being complicit in Trump’s morally bankrupt regime.

Of course, wherever in the world you live, your taxes generally help to fund something awful. As a legal resident but non-citizen of the US, however, I am subject to taxation without representation. I cannot attempt to control where my tax dollars go by voting for a particular political candidate. I can, however, choose not to pay US taxes by extricating myself from the country. As an expat, I am in the privileged position of being able to vote with my feet and my finances.

I know lots of Britons in the US. We all think of ourselves – and are generally thought of – as “expats”, rather than “migrants” or “immigrants”. But that word is applied only to a select few. Excepting certain intra-European nuances, the rule of thumb seems to be that anyone who possesses a western passport and moves to another country is an expat, never a migrant. This is not just semantics; the differences in meaning between “expat” and the more dehumanising “migrant” and “immigrant” are important to parse, because they shine a light on the double standards applied to international migration. Being able to think of yourself as an “expat” is a luxury few people have. It is certainly not a luxury enjoyed by the children being separated from their parents as part of the US’s immigration policy. In a US increasingly hostile to foreigners, those of us who qualify (for now, at least) as the “right” sort of foreigner must start thinking about how ethical it is to passively enjoy our privileged positions.

But you know what? Let’s forget Trump for a minute. Because, even if you leave all the ethical considerations aside, the US has long ceased to be a place anyone except the very wealthy or the very desperate would rationally choose to live. There is the country’s inequitable healthcare system, for one thing; being poor and sick is basically a death sentence here. Then there is the US’s embarrassing lack of parental leave and its deadly obsession with guns. Why on earth would you choose to live in a country where kids get bulletproof shields for their backpacks as a gift for graduating middle school?

I am not packing up and leaving the US yet, mainly because I have not persuaded my American partner to relocate to Brexit Britain. So, this is not my “Goodbye to New York” essay. However, it is a requiem of sorts for the US. There was a time I considered the US to be a land of opportunity. But unless your last name is Trump, the American dream is dead.