Voting with Feet

“Voting with your feet” usually means leaving. You don’t like the schools, or the taxes, or the politics, so you move somewhere that suits you better.

Lately I have tended towards staying & investing.

A few years ago I reclaimed citizenship in Austria, the country my Jewish grandparents fled. A second citizenship made me stop and ask what I was signing up for.

A citizen doesn’t only draw protection from a state; a citizen pays into it. Austria has compulsory military service for men 18-35 years old. Where you hold citizenship decides whose roads and schools and pensions your life’s work funds.

A country’s immigration law dictates whether it wants more feet. An aging economy with a shrinking tax base looks for people to bring in. Letting people in is how a place stays financially solvent.

The national version of “voting with your feet” is abstract to most Americans. ~5,000 Americans renounced their citizenship in 2025. With a population of ~320,000,000 citizens that is an effective annual rate of ~0.0016%.

Most taxes I pay as an American go to the federal government. But learning about municipal finance made the concept of loyalty more concrete for me: sales tax, property tax, permit fees. That money goes somewhere, and the somewhere includes institutions a few miles from my house. Where I shop, who I hire, whether I rent or buy are small recurring votes for somebody down the street.

California makes this weirder than it needs to be. Under Prop 13, two neighbors in identical houses can owe wildly different property taxes based on nothing but who bought longer ago – which quietly rewards sitting still. (I wrote about that regressivity here.)

The smallest version is the one I’m inside now. A household is its own mini jurisdiction. You pool your money and your hours and keep choosing to pay into it. My wife and I picked each other, and picked this city, and then a third person arrived who got no vote in any of it: the newest set of feet in the place. Most days staying in our current residence is the best option – until you start pricing childcare in our area. It’s deranged, around $3,000 a month, and every provider we’ve met is a first-generation immigrant. Not most of them. Every one. The people who’d let two of us keep working and still raise this kid are the same people a louder version of the country spends its energy trying to keep out. Letting people in isn’t limited to new feet arriving from abroad; those new feet are a big part of why anyone here gets to grow a family at all.

Being somewhere on purpose is a kind of loyalty too, and loyalty does add value to a place. I believe that. It’s most of what I took from Melody Warnick’s This Is Where You Belong: that where you land matters far less than what you do once you’re there.

But Prop 13 is also a preview of where this goes wrong. The people who’ve been present longest tend to feel they’ve earned disproportionate say, and a lot of them spend it on keeping new feet out. That’s the Homevoter Hypothesis: local politics run by people safeguarding what’s been built against the people who’d like to stay too.

Which sends me back to the passport, and to the half of the phrase I skipped. Voting with your feet usually means leaving, and my grandparents did leave: they fled Austria on the cusp of the Holocaust. I’m here three generations later making a wordy case for staying put.

And they didn’t run to America. The United States said no. Bolivia, however, said yes. And so my father was born in Bolivia, a poorer country that had every excuse to call itself full and didn’t. My grandmother and father reached the US only years later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother re-married an American. My grandmother and father were let in as a wife and stepson, not as refugees. Our country likes to tell this kind of story as though it were the hero of it. For my family, the USA was a closed door.

This wasn’t bad luck or lost paperwork. In July 1938, a few months after Austria was annexed by the Nazis and its Jews were suddenly stripped of everything, 32 countries sent delegates to Évian, France, to decide what to do about the people trying to get out. One after another they gave sympathetic speeches and then explained why they couldn’t take anyone; the United States, which had called the conference, was among them. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to take more refugees in. The Nazi government read the outcome out loud and correctly: the world had just admitted it didn’t want these people either.

So I know what the closed door looks like. Presence is a vote; so is deciding who gets to be present at all. None of this was ever only about showing up and adding what you can. It’s about not being the one standing in the door – the way this country stood in it once, against the people it now says it would have saved.