LIFE BETWEEN TWO COUNTRIES By Tori · GoEuroWay · Emmen, Netherlands
Yesterday was the Fourth of July. America turned 250. And I spent it here in the Netherlands, almost a decade into a life I built on the other side of the ocean. Sometimes Americans comment how could you leave the greatest country, leave your family and friends? — and Dutch folks like to remind me that immigrants are ruining their country, that there’s a housing crisis and inflation, AND that I need to learn Dutch, you obnoxious American! (By the way — Ik spreek Nederlands, maar niet voor Amerikanen.)
This is the platform I use to help Americans who want to move to the Netherlands — which I recognize is a privilege I don’t take lightly. Not everyone gets this opportunity.
So on this 250th birthday of the USA, where I was born and raised, I wanted to address some things.
I’ve been posting about life abroad for years, but most recently — since starting my relocation business, GoEuroWay — I’ve been making reels to help people with the things I wish I’d known when I made my move. And if there’s one thing all this posting has taught me, it’s that there are exactly three kinds of people who show up in my comments. Some relate. Some debate. And some are just always gonna hate. Yesterday leaned hard toward the hate side — so here I am, typing away. A short reel on IG was notgoing to cut it this time. I had a lot more to say. So let’s talk about it. Honestly. With facts.
How this started
All I did was comment on a video about diversity being what makes a country strong. And I do feel passionately about it — because I watch from across the ocean as people try to erase diversity in a country that was built on that very thing, and it both saddens me and makes me angry.
Even nature knows better. Plant a whole field with a single crop and one disease can wipe out everything — that’s exactly what caused the Irish potato famine. But a diverse ecosystem bends, adapts, and survives. Diversity is what makes life resilient; sameness is what makes it fragile. Or, as Maya Angelou put it: “In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”
And honestly? I feel a little helpless watching this unfold — not just in America, but all over the world. So when someone left a comment I thought was true, I related to it. I didn’t even write anything back. I tapped a single clap emoji. That was it. That was the whole crime.
And then a guy came flying out of nowhere — to argue with a clap emoji. That was all I’d done: someone made a comment I agreed with, I tapped applause, and off he went. He informed me that America is greater than France and the Netherlands combined, that he’d studied abroad in France for a year (which, honestly, made it stranger — why go if it’s all so beneath you?), and that he was so glad to be American, and I could gladly stay over here. So — thank you, I guess, for the wise advice.
Here’s the part that got me. His IG bio had something like twenty different country flags across it — a whole display of how worldly and welcoming he supposedly is. I think he assumed I was Dutch and took it upon himself to defend America to a foreigner. So I replied, friendly, something like: Are you okay? I love my country too, for the record. And he twisted it into me attacking him. Classic. I clapped at a comment and somehow I was the aggressor.
So no, I’m not going to spend this being fair to him. I’m going to be honest with you — the people who actually come to me trying to make a real decision. Because his “America is the greatest country on earth” theory only holds up from one very specific seat: privileged, comfortable, and never once let down by the system he’s bragging about. Not everyone is living in that America. So let’s poke some holes in it — with facts, in both directions, the kind nobody selling you a fantasy will give you.
First, the honest part: America does some things better
First, the honest part: America does some things better I’m not here to tell you America is the villain and Europe is paradise. Anyone selling you that is selling you something. I see fancy relocation companies and TikTok and IG influencers every day selling the European dream. And it can be a dream — but it can also be really hard. It’s one of the hardest things I have ever done in my entire life, and I am sincerely glad I did it. I have my own reasons, and everyone’s reasons for moving abroad will be drastically different, with some common themes weaving through the stories. But let’s get to it. Let’s put it out there, so we aren’t just throwing random stuff online that really only does one thing: keep us all divided and angry about which country is better than the other.
The US genuinely wins on some things, and I’ll say them out loud: bigger homes, cheaper gas, lower taxes, and a real upside if you make a fabulous income. And the nature — my goodness, the nature. Mountains, oceans, deserts, forests, wildlife, all of it in one country. It is a genuinely gorgeous, wildly diverse place.
But honestly? The thing I miss most isn’t any of that. It’s the people. Everyday Americans are some of the warmest, most genuinely welcoming folks on the planet — the kind who’ll strike up a conversation in the checkout line, go out of their way to help a stranger, and make you feel like you belong before they even catch your name. That’s the America I come from. And it’s not the America Europe usually sees, because it’s not the one the media shows them.
Right now, with the World Cup being played across the US, I think the world is getting a real glimpse of it — the neighbors, the volunteers, the strangers pointing you the right way with a grin. That’s my America. That’s the one I love. So if you make good money, and nothing ever goes wrong, and you’re surrounded by those people — it can be a fantastic place to live. That’s true.
The problem is that “if nothing ever goes wrong” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. And as we all know — it’s not if something goes wrong. It’s when.
Let’s start with the money
My American friend claimed Americans make more than double what a Dutch and French person earn combined.
Here’s the thing: it’s actually really easy to check wage data for each country online. So here goes:
United States: the median worker earns about $51,000/year (all workers), or about $63,000/year for full-time, year-round work. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024)
Netherlands: the typical worker earns roughly €47,000–58,000/year gross — modal income is about €46,500, average gross around €53,000. (Dutch CBS, 2024)
Same ballpark. The US sits modestly higher, especially for full-time workers. But “more than double”? I’m sorry, sir — it just ain’t true.
“Average” is a sneaky word. Put a billionaire in a room with ten teachers and the “average” person in that room is a millionaire. That’s exactly what’s happening when someone brags about the US average salary — a few people at the very top drag the number up, and everyone else just gets counted in it. A bigger paycheck sounds great — until you see what America makes you spend it on.
Healthcare: this is where “greatest country” falls apart
Forget the monthly premiums and the fine print. Here’s the only question that actually matters: if this year
goes badly — a surgery, an accident, a baby, a diagnosis — how much can it cost you?
In the Netherlands, no matter what goes wrong, your deductible caps out at €385 a year.
It’s called the eigen risico. You pay the first €385 of your medical costs, and after that, the care in your basic package is covered — surgery, a hospital stay, cancer treatment, a broken leg. Hit €385 and you’re done for the year. Your GP is always free and never counts toward it, and kids under 18 pay nothing at all
— no premium, no deductible.
And being totally honest, because that’s the whole point of what I do: a couple of small extras sit outside that €385 — certain medications are capped at €250 a year, and there’s a small hourly fee for the home nurse who helps you the week after a baby. That’s the whole story. No surprise bills. No five-figure gut- punch. You always know your number.
In America, if you have good insurance, your worst-case year is around $9,200. Per person. On top of your premiums. And it resets every January.
So even for an insured, employed American — the lucky one — a bad year costs roughly 20 times more than it does for anyone in the Netherlands.
And that $9,200 assumes the best case: that your insurance actually pays. More and more, it doesn’t. In 2024, insurers denied about 1 in 5 in-network claims — not care from some out-of-network stranger, but from the doctors and hospitals inside your own plan. And a denied claim usually doesn’t count toward your $9,200 cap at all. You just eat it — or you go without the care.
So on top of your premium, your deductible, and your cap, here’s what quietly sneaks up on insured, bill- paying Americans:
- Denied procedures — your doctor says you need the surgery, the MRI, the treatment; the insurance company says you don’t. Now it’s your problem. —
- “Not medically necessary” — the three words a clerk uses to overrule your actual doctor. Prescriptions that aren’t “on the list” — if your medication isn’t on the insurer’s approved formulary, you can pay full price. —
- Out-of-network costs — need a specialist your plan doesn’t cover? You could pay far more, under a separate and higher cap — or none at all.
- The ambulance — the ride that saved your life still isn’t protected from surprise billing. It can bill you thousands.
And the kicker? Fewer than 1% of denied claims are ever appealed. Most people are too exhausted, too sick, or too buried in paperwork to fight — which is exactly what the system is counting on. And all of that is for the people with insurance. Here’s what the “our salaries are double” guy will never mention: about 26 million Americans have no insurance at all.
For them, there is no worst-case number. There’s no cap, no ceiling — just the bill. And the bill looks like this:
🚑Ambulance ride: $1,000–2,000
🦴 Broken leg: $2,500+
🤰 Having a baby: ~$18,000
🏥 Surgery and a few days in the hospital: $30,000+
In the Netherlands, all of that is capped at €385. In America, without insurance, it can cost you everything.
And it does. Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Not overspending. Not bad luck in business. Getting sick. People lose their homes because they got cancer.
That cannot happen in the Netherlands. Everyone is covered. You cannot be too poor, too sick, or too unemployed to see a doctor — and losing your job doesn’t mean losing your coverage.
Let’s talk groceries — and what’s actually in them
First, the price myth, because Americans love to say food is cheaper back home. The honest answer: it depends what’s in your cart.
Cheaper in the US: meat (chicken, beef) and gas.
Cheaper in the Netherlands: produce, bread, eggs, and dairy.
About the same: milk.
And the “cheap American groceries” reputation is fading fast. US food prices have climbed hard — eggs rose triple digits during the bird-flu years, and beef is up around 21% in a single year. Once you factor in rent, groceries here actually run a few percent cheaper than in the US. So if you’re standing in a Dutch supermarket feeling like your bill is smaller, you’re not imagining it. (USDA / BLS / Numbeo, 2025)
That said, America is enormous, and I don’t want to paint a whole continent with one brush. Grocery prices swing wildly by region — a cart in California or New York looks nothing like one in Mississippi or Alabama, and a national “average” quietly flattens a country where rent and a gallon of milk can cost double depending on which state line you’re standing behind. So take any single US number — mine included — with that in mind.
But here’s something that genuinely doesn’t exist here the way it does back home: food deserts. In the US, roughly 19 million people — about 6% of the country — live in areas the USDA officially classifies this way: low-income neighborhoods where the nearest real supermarket is more than a mile away in a city, or more than ten miles out in the countryside. For the two million–plus of them who don’t own a car, that’s not an inconvenience — it’s a wall. Their “grocery store” becomes a gas station, a dollar store, or a fast-food window, where fresh produce barely exists and what little there is costs more — milk runs about 5% higher, cereal up to 25% higher — than in a comfortable suburb ten minutes away. The people with the least end up paying the most, for the worst food. In the Netherlands, and most of Europe, this is almost unheard of: towns are dense and walkable, a supermarket is usually a short bike ride away, and you don’t need a car and a full tank just to buy vegetables.
But honestly? Price isn’t even the part that matters most. It’s what’s in the food.
Here’s the difference almost nobody tells you before they move: Europe makes food companies prove an ingredient is safe before it’s allowed. America lets them sell it until it’s proven dangerous. In the EU, if an additive’s safety is uncertain, it stays off the shelf until it’s cleared. In the US, companies can essentially declare their own ingredients “safe” — a loophole called GRAS — sometimes without the FDA reviewing it, or even knowing it’s in your food.
The result is a long list of things banned across Europe but sitting on American shelves right now:
Want to know what that actually looks like on a shelf? A few that stopped me in my tracks:
- Chlorine-washed chicken — banned in the EU since 1997. Europe requires clean handling the whole way through instead of rinsing the problem off at the end.
- Growth hormones in beef, and rBST in dairy cows — both banned in the EU, both routine in the US.
- Ractopamine — a drug that bulks up pigs and cattle, banned in the EU and over 100 other countries. Still legal here.
- Potassium bromate (in bread), titanium dioxide (a whitener in candy and sauces), and preservatives like BHA and BHT — all flagged by EU regulators over cancer or DNA concerns, all still allowed in the US.
- Synthetic dyes like Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 — the ones in so much American cereal, candy, and sports drinks. Europe bans them or slaps a warning label on them, and a lot of EU products just use beet juice or turmeric instead.
- Around 85 pesticides banned in the EU are still sprayed on American crops.
Want to know what that actually looks like on a shelf? A few that stopped me in my tracks:
Bread — this is the one that gets me. American sandwich bread is often loaded with added sugar and dough conditioners so it can sit on a shelf for weeks. It got so extreme that in 2020, Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled that Subway’s bread has too much sugar to legally be called “bread” — the sugar came to 10% of the flour weight, five times Ireland’s legal limit. Legally, it’s closer to cake. Meanwhile a fresh Dutch bakery loaf is flour, water, yeast, and salt — and it goes stale in a few days, because that’s what real bread does. A lot of American bread also contains azodicarbonamide, a dough conditioner banned in the EU and Australia, better known as the chemical in yoga mats and shoe soles.
Froot Loops. In the US they’re dyed with Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Blue 1. Here in the Netherlands? You can’t even buy them — they’re not sold. Where they are sold elsewhere in Europe, they’re reformulated with color from carrot, watermelon, and blueberry instead. Same story with Gatorade, which PepsiCo makes dye-free abroad using black carrot juice, and Heinz ketchup, which drops the high-fructose corn syrup in its European version.
And it’s not that the European versions are health food — Froot Loops are still Froot Loops. It’s that the same company reformulates the same product for Europe, because here those dyes come with a required warning label: “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” In America? No warning. Just breakfast.
To fill your fridge here, that same company makes a cleaner version because it has to. Back home, it sells you the other one because it can. Credit where it’s due, though — the US is finally starting to move. It banned Red Dye No. 3 in early 2025 and pledged to phase out several other synthetic dyes. But it’s decades behind Europe, and much of it is still voluntary, which means companies can drag their feet.
None of this means American food is poison and European food is perfect — it’s not that simple. But a lot of Americans who move here notice it fast: shorter ingredient lists, food that tastes more like food, fewer labels full of words you can’t pronounce. And if you’ve got kids, this tends to be the part that hits hardest. It’s one of those quiet things you don’t realize you were missing until it’s gone.
Paid time off: the one Americans feel in their bones
The United States is the only developed country on earth that doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave, paid sick leave, or paid vacation. Not the worst — the only.
The Netherlands guarantees at least four weeks of paid vacation by law, plus paid parental leave. Land of the free, and you can’t take a paid day off to hold your newborn.
What about child benefits? Both countries have them
And because I’m not out to paint either country as perfect, let me say this plainly: Americans do get help
with kids too.
US: the Child Tax Credit is up to $2,200 per child (raised from $2,000 in July 2025), up to $1,700 of it refundable. But it comes once a year at tax time, and it’s tied to your earnings — earn too little and you get less.
Netherlands: kinderbijslag is smaller per child (~€1,100–1,300/year) but it’s universal cash, paid every quarter, whether you work or not — plus an income-based top-up (kindgebonden budget) for families who need more, plus those free kids on health insurance.
So it’s not “one helps families and one doesn’t.” It’s that America gives you less help the less you make — the families who need it most get the smallest check, or none. The Netherlands does the opposite: the more you’re struggling, the more the system steps in.
The one that stops parents cold
I saved this one for near the end, because it’s the one I think about the most.
In America, 95% of public schools run active shooter drills. Children as young as five — kindergartners — are taught to hide in silence, lock the door, stay away from the windows, in case someone comes to kill them. This is a normal part of the school week now. An entire generation is growing up rehearsing their own possible murder between spelling tests.
And it’s not paranoia driving it. Firearms are the number one cause of death for American children and teenagers — not car accidents, not disease. Guns. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, nearly 400,000 students have been exposed to gun violence at their schools. (CDC / Everytown / Washington Post)
Here in the Netherlands, my kids’ friends have never heard of an active shooter drill. It’s not a thing. The idea of practicing how to hide from a gunman at school would baffle a Dutch parent — because it simply doesn’t happen here. Kids bike to school, and the scariest part of the day is the weather.
Now, I’ll be honest — this wasn’t my daily reality as a mother. My kids are older; they came up before active shooter drills became a normal part of growing up in America. I was fortunate that way, and I won’t borrow a fear I didn’t have to live.
But it is my reality as a grandmother. I have grandchildren in Florida and Arkansas — two states with some of the loosest gun laws in the country. Both are “constitutional carry” states, meaning a person can carry a loaded gun in public with no permit, no training, and no background check to carry. Arkansas ranks near the very bottom in the nation for the strength of its gun laws, and some school districts there have even moved to arm their own teachers and staff. Florida added open carry in 2025, on top of the permitless carry it passed in 2023. So from an ocean away, yes — I worry about the little ones I love. (Everytown / Giffords, 2025)
For the parents and grandparents raising kids in that reality right now, my heart goes out to you. I can’t fully describe what it must do to you to send your five-year-old off knowing they’ll practice hiding from a gunman that week. That’s a weight no family should carry — and for some, escaping it is the single biggest reason they never look back.
So why would anyone leave “the greatest country in the world” ?
Because “greatest” depends entirely on who you are and whether your luck holds.
Look at what we just walked through. Your paycheck is barely bigger once you do the honest math — and smaller once you subtract what you hand back. One bad diagnosis can cost you €385 here or your house there. You get no guaranteed day off to hold your newborn. The food on your kids’ plates is full of things banned an ocean away. And none of that even touches you… until it does.
So here’s the short answer: the greatest country in the world is only great if you can afford it. Great if you’re healthy. Great if you’re employed. Great if nothing ever goes wrong. And that’s not greatness — that’s a country that works beautifully for the people it already works for.
So here’s the short answer: the greatest country in the world is only great if you can afford it. Great if you’re healthy. Great if you’re employed. Great if nothing ever goes wrong. And that’s not greatness — that’s a country that works beautifully for the people it already works for.
His version of America — the one with good insurance, a safety net, a cushion — is real. It exists. He’s just standing inside it, assuming everyone else is too. But he’s one of the privileged few. Most Americans were never living in his America to begin with.
Because the truth is that the majority of working-class Americans are struggling right now — really struggling. And guys like Double Salary Guy — or, as I like to call him, Trust Fund Baby — are floating along in their own bubble, genuinely oblivious to it. When you’ve never had to choose between a doctor’s visit and rent, it’s easy to believe the system works. It works for you.
That’s not a country being great. That’s a country being great to him.
The truth? I didn’t set out to leave America. I fell in love with a Dutch man, we got married, and my eyes were opened to a completely different way of living. That’s the honest origin story. No grand political exit — just love, and then a slow-motion realization.
Because once you step outside, you can’t unsee it. I still love where I’m from — I get nostalgic about the people, about the South especially. But I’ve also learned that you can love your country and grieve what’s happening to it at the same time. You can feel real outrage when you realize how much you were sold — that “greatest country in the world” was a story, and a lot of it wasn’t true.
We’re a country that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. So disconnected from the rest of the world that we can’t even see how other people live, or that it might be better. And what’s actually hollowing America out isn’t immigrants or terrorists — the things we’re told to fear. It’s greed. It’s power. It’s the end stage of a system where a handful of billionaires make the decisions and everyone else absorbs the cost.
I couldn’t see any of that from the inside. I had to leave the bubble to understand it. Leaving didn’t make me love America less — it’s the reason I finally understood it at all.
And before my Dutch readers get too comfortable — a lot of you do the exact same thing. I hear it constantly: we don’t want Americans, we’re full, no more immigrants, go learn the language. It’s the same fear coming out of a different mouth — the same need to find someone to blame for problems that were never really about foreigners at all. Left or right, Dutch or American, there will always be people who don’t agree with me, who don’t want me here, who need this to be a fight.
And that’s fine. Because here’s the thing: I’m not trying to change their minds. I never was. I’m here for the people quietly weighing the same kind of leap I once took — the ones who don’t want to argue about any of it, they just want honest information to figure out what’s right for them.
Because underneath all of this — the salaries, the healthcare, the food, the flags people collect in their bios — what everyone is really chasing is the same thing. Security. Safety. The feeling that you and the people you love are going to be okay. Wanting your kids to grow up without practicing how to hide from a gunman between math lessons. That’s the whole human project, in the end.
And I never lose sight of how lucky I am to have chosen this. Choosing to immigrate is a profound privilege. Most people who leave their countries don’t get to weigh the pros and cons over coffee — right now, more than 122 million people around the world have been forced from their homes, not for a better life but to keep their lives at all: fleeing war, violence, and persecution. Roughly one in every 67 people on earth. I got to plan my move. They are running for theirs.
So if there’s one thing I hope you take from all of this, it’s that we are so much more alike than we are different. Every one of us — American, Dutch, and everyone in between — just wants somewhere safe to build a life and raise the people we love. The sooner we remember that, the less energy we waste fighting over whose country wins.
Some people will relate. Some will debate. And some are just gonna hate. I write for the ones who relate — and my comments stay open for all three.
Sources: OECD, U.S. Census Bureau, Dutch CBS, Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, CMS, KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, USDA, BLS, EFSA, FDA, CDC, Everytown, Giffords Law Center, UNHCR, Belastingdienst. Figures are 2024–2026 and current as of writing.