>>2241822>Do you think it would be possible to just go to a new country and disappear as in like never come back starting a new life as a new person? Feel like it would be impossible these days?I think it would be very difficult if not completely impossible. In the age of machine-readable/chipped passports, it seems much harder (and presumably more expensive) than it once was to get workable false identity documents, for starters, and you can’t establish yourself somewhere without eventually having to prove who you are to SOMEONE, unless you expect never to have a job or an apartment or a bank account. Just living completely under the radar as a “sans papiers” would be too precarious to survive long-term. I have read interviews with people who do this, and it sounds terrifying. You’re vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation and you have to watch your back 24/7.
Plus I assume you have to erase your old identity somehow, and I feel like everyone who tries to fake his own death gets caught before long, although perhaps that’s just because those who fake their own deaths are all boneheads.
I think it would be comparatively easy to live a lie in a new country—deny your identity to everyone you met, perpetually pretend to be someone else—but you’d always be tied on some official levels to your real self.
And I know that it is possible, although vanishingly rare, despite what some right-wingers like to screech, to fake/hustle your way into refugee status. I live in Switzerland and a handful of bogus Ukrainian refugees have been apprehended since February (they were just just about all Ukrainian and Russian nationals who were already in Switzerland before we started accepting refugees from the Ukraine war), and I assume that some people from other conflict zones have done it before them, although it’s really very, very few people in all.
But anyone who thinks it’s easy or desirable to live like a refugee is a fucking idiot.
