Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Leaving the Country" (w/ Nancy L Green)

August 5, 2019·49 min·3 clips

In 1920s Paris, American women complained to the US consulate when their hat maker refused to return their hats — and consular officers actually went and retrieved them.

International travel looks easy until it breaks. Crispin begins with the fantasy that international movement can be cheap, simple, and reversible for certain people. Then the border shows up. Green's work follows the messier question: what can the government back home do for someone living abroad? The answer is useful, but hardly magical. Consular officers can help, though their help runs through local law, office rules, and jurisdiction. Green opens with material that is almost funny. Some American women wanted officials to step in over hats, dressmakers, and complaints that now sound strangely personal. That comedy has a point. The small cases expose a bigger expectation: citizenship should follow you like a rescue plan. It does not. An American embassy can offer lists of lawyers, including English-speaking ones, and steer citizens toward local help. At times, officers went further. Green describes archives full of correspondence where consular staff tried to help Americans stuck overseas. Still, expectation runs past authority fast. The real snag is the space between two jurisdictions, where neither the home country nor the host country can make the consequences disappear. Jail makes that plain. An American abroad may find out quickly that the United States has limited reach once local law takes over. That is where the romance of mobility turns sour. Green ties the problem to people living and working in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, which makes the present feel less new. Even expatriate life has a longer paper trail than its myth suggests. Her final comparison makes the post-World War Two pattern look less like a sudden invention and more like another chapter in an older story.

As heard by us

A skeptical, useful look at who can move, and who gets stuck when the paperwork bites.

Jessa Crispin and Nancy Green push back on the easy idea that crossing borders is just a matter of wanting it badly enough. The episode works best when it gets specific about consular help and legal jurisdiction, and it keeps circling back to the obstacles people hit once they…

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Why you'd press play

You want a sharp case against the easy story that moving across borders is simple.

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