Neko-chan said:
If you want to move to another country, you can't do it on a spur of the moment thing. It takes planning. We started my process 18 months before I even moved. Dunno about other cuntries, but here you don't become a citizen just because you're married to one anymore. And they'll make you jump through tons of hoops and red tape.
It is not merely a matter of planning and waiting and paperwork, though.
I know that, when I immigrated here 9 years ago, there were certain criteria you had to meet to even be ELIGIBLE to apply for immigration (including what job sector you were qualified to work in) and then it could take several to many years, and several thousand dollars, to process your application. It also varies quite a lot depending on where you're immigrating FROM (the fastest, for Canada, being other members of the British Empire, with the US being a close second... if you are trying to immigrate to Canada from some small less-westernized country it can realistically take up to ten years EVEN IF you meet all immigration criteria; even spousal immigration from some countries can take two to five years).
Bear in mind that most countries -- certainly US, Canada and NZ -- have multiple types of immigration applications. There is applying as a new spouse of a citizen; applying as a family member of a citizen; applying as an investor bringing bags o' money into the country; and applying as a self-employed or "skilled worker" person who has no existing ties to NZ but jsut wants to move there, which is what most of y'all would presumably be doing.
I did a little googling for NZ since it is so popular (bear in mind that it is an expensive place to live in some ways due to its island-ness, does not have the very strongest economy at the moment, and is on an AWFUL lotta peoples' lists of 'places I'd like to live, at least in an imaginary way'). This
http://www.immigration.govt.nz/migrant/ is where most of yer information is. Here
http://www.immigration.govt.nz/pointsindicator/ is a points calculator to see if you qualify for possible admission in the skilled worker category (self-employed is a very difficult way to immigrate in most countries).
Go run yourself thru the calculator (also, go try to find the list of careers/jobs that QUALIFY for skilled immigrant applications; I didn't try real hard, but it's there somewhere. Not all jobs/careers qualify). Even if you imagine that you can get a job offer from a NZ company, you may still find that you don't make the minimum point threshold. If you *do* make the minimum point threshold, my reading of their webpages is that processing times are fairly swift, like 6 months or so (for skilled immigrants without job offers), unless I'm missing something.
Of course if some event causes you to want to leave the US for NZ, you can expect many many other people to want to do the same and immigration criteria and processing times are likely to change
Most people in Sweden speak English (to different degrees, of course).
Most of the Scandinavian-country citizens I've met over the years speak better more-correct English than most Americans do
(although obviously they usually speak it with an accent)
Pat
