Note: I will use Russia when I need examples because that is the country mentioned in this sub thread, but each and every country has its own unique things about itself for the better and the worse, and even within each one there are usually differences between its regions, between city and countryside, and among its ethnic communities.

Note 2: Some of what I will say may relate to stuff I will post in my longer reply to the BC thread, so apologies for any repetitions.

First, emigration is not the answer to your problems if your problems are "I am a pedo and I want to live openly out and/or engage in actual contact." That is not going to be safe anywhere. I'm probably over generalizing saying anywhere, but even the opennest culture and the most welcoming circumstances are not going to be the utopia a potential expat dreams of.

I will also add; although this is a personal opinion more than a true piece of advice: yes, many places may be better than your country in terms of X, Y, Z, but emigration because of them is in part an act of surrender. If my country is bad, my first option should be, well, let's try to make it better; rather than, oh well, I will go somewhere else not as bad. Of course there are limits to this, especially when there are political and economic crises: I'm not advocating to be suicidal by putting yourself and your own in danger. What I'm saying is that an Anglo-Saxon pedo in Russia is one fewer Anglo-Saxon pedo in the Anglosphere trying to improve things. Here I use the Anglosphere as example because I assume most of GC members live in it.

Second, you will never truly become a local. This may affect your chances to interact with locals, including of course children and families; and it will also affect your own chances at being comfortable with yourself in the new place. Obviously this varies depending how much your new place has in common with your old one (more on that later); but again, this undermines your chances to find the utopia, or even something significantly better than where you are.

Again I'm over generalizing. Someone who arrived very young, as anchor babies and dreamers in the USA; may become localized because that's the culture they've been living in most of their lives and since very little. Even if you arrive later this may become true over a long period of time. If I move to Russia during or right after my college degree around age 20; because I'm a zoologist and research belugas or Siberian tigers, or an art historian and research Russian art rather than Western or Asian, and stay in Russia ever since... well yes, by the time I'm 50 I'm probably Russified enough to pass as Russian. But those are exceptions.

Third, I think you covered basically everything important there was to cover regarding emigration.

Climate / weather: Of course, you will want to be in a place where you will not be overwhelmed because it's too cold or too hot, too dry or too rainy. If you don't like hurricanes, avoid Florida, and so on.

Related though not the same: geography. If you like to live near the sea, well don't move too far inland (which is most of Russia, for instance). If you like mountains, don't move to plains. Or the opposite; if you don't like mountains, don't move to hilly or mountainous places. I'm stating the obvious maybe, but consider everything. Some places have active volcanos or more earthquake activity. Other places have floods. Yet other places have wildfires. And so on.

You only mentioned "unfriendliness of the people" which is a Russian thing when applied to your post; but this is easily generalized as the whole cultural outlook. It is hard, maybe impossible, to cover everything regarding a country's culture. My best advice there would be, if you're interested in a country to move to, first travel to it, preferrably several times; preferrably a longer stay sometime (that is, not a weekend but, let's say, two weeks); and preferrably explore beyond the most travelled paths and the most tourist laden places. Because those would be where you would be most of the time if you choose to move. Watch local TV and listen to local radio and music.

Consider other three things regarding culture. One, how close or distant their culture is from yours. That will always help or hinder your chances to truly adapt and the chances the locals will like you personally. Two, how open to foreigners the people are on average. Russia is pretty low on the list for a more or less developed country; though probably Japan would be the most difficult among the more developed countries. Third, security. It makes little sense to move because country B is more pedo friendly, or as you put it, less paranoid, when you would then be more at risk of being caught in an organized crime shooting, or mugged, or where foreigners are seen as easy marks for fraud, extortion or ransom kidnapping.

Politics does matter. This is not a political post and I will not make it into one. But don't be indifferent to it. Politics always has an influence in your quality of life. It does as a local and it does as an expat, even if you never become a citizen. How much of a deal breaker this is will vary according to your own preferences and the interaction with the rest of factors mentioned. I cannot answer the questions for everyone here. I would just avoid countries like North Korea, Burma and Saudi Arabia for regime reasons, countries at war, countries in deep economic crisis like Venezuela. But again, this is an over generalization and I cannot go into further detail without making this post way too long.

Finally, language. I think it's self evident that if you want to move you will need to learn the language. My recommendation for English speakers is to consult the Department of State scale of difficulty of foreign languages. It was designed to assess the difficulty of learning foreign languages for prospective US diplomats. Among countries' official languages, those assessed to be the easiest for native English speakers are, if I remember correctly, Romance (except Romanian?), Dutch and North Germanic (German is considered to be harder because of the greater complexity of its verb and noun declensions). The hardest are, again, if I remember correctly, Korean and Japanese, because of the combination of very alien vocabulary, grammar, and writing system.

That said, Russian overall isn't difficult. It's that English is easy by a worldwide comparison. The greatest difficulties of English are, one, its huge vocabulary, which is tempered by how many English words (or Greco-Latin words which English uses) have made their way into other languages; two, that its orthography is irregular, but again, that's moderated by it being wholly alphabetic and by the Latin alphabet being used so widely across the world; and third, its variety of accents because of how many people and places speak it -- but while that may be an issue for a non native moving into the deepest regions of Britain or the USA, it isn't for watching a mainstream movie.

Evidently, your impression of Russian is influenced by an English background and I can't blame you for it. I know very well that language learning is heavily influenced by which is your first language. My only point here is that English speakers generally are at a disadvantage because of how easy English is: to me, notably, a fully alphabetic writing system; and extremely simple noun and verbal grammar with very few agreements and declensions. Even among European languages, English is unusually easy.


I will finish by saying that, from afar, I have crushes on some countries in all continents for different reasons. But I know that if I were to move there, I would probably not find utopia.

Also, I would probably have already tried anyway, if it wasn't for three factors: I want to be relatively close to my blood family; I absolutely wouldn't want to leave my girls without my support if they need it; and what I said above: unless external circumstances are truly awful, I prefer to stay and try to make things better "here" than give up and go somewhere better "up there".