Survey Shows USA And UK Tank For Friendliness

If making friends once you’ve expatriated is important, choosing a country rated highly as regards friendly nationals in a recent survey may not be the best way forward.

A major issue with relocation, whether it’s for work purposes or retirement, is leaving an established network of friends and attempting to reconstruct something similar overseas. Cultural and language problems as well as the sense of insecurity caused by unfamiliar surroundings can make forming friendships far harder than in the home country. Another difficulty in these troubled times may be locals’ changing perceptions of your country of origin.

Nowadays, a plethora of online surveys attempts to educate expats and those considering relocation on every aspect of the chosen destination country. Rankings are often predictable, but they’re also useful for gauging changing expat attitudes towards particular nations and their citizens. For example, in a recent survey by InterNations both the USA and Britain dropped way down the ratings for friendly locals, with the US at 36 and the UK at 56, whilst the top scorer was Portugal.

Uganda, Kazakhstan and Romania scored 16, 28 and 19th places respectively, even although the first two countries are unlikely to be on any savvy expat’s priority list for finding friends. The UK’s drop from 19th to 56th doesn’t necessarily mean Brits are now closing their minds and doors to expat arrivals, but it might just be that new arrivals are seeing the UK in a different light since Brexit. The same, but magnified, might well be true of the ‘unfriendly’ tag now attached to Trump’s USA.

Interestingly, little Cambodia jumped from nowhere to fourth place in the friendliness stakes, with one-time favourite neighbouring Thailand nowhere to be seen. Admittedly, the Land of Smiles isn’t what it used to be as regards expat welcomes and crops up regularly on the negative side of international popular press coverage. Even so, judging a nation’s friendliness towards its expat community shouldn’t be dependent on how it handles its political problems.