You can’t ‘gentrify’ a place with your mere presense.

People saying you’d gentrify a place by moving there are making assumptions about:

• the community you’re moving to,

• what your relative wealth would be in that community, and

• how you’d spend that wealth and engage with local business and culture.

None of those assumptions reflect well on the people making them. Fuck’em.

If you can, leave Canada. Be part of the brain drain. And move to an AES country so that your friends and family in Canada have a window into what life is like there.

I’ve been an immigrant all my life. Even now I don’t live in the country where I was born. My advice is: don’t leave. I left with my family when I was too young to make a choice, the choice was made for me. Most people are racist. Not racist in the “arrgg I’ll kill you if you look different” but more in the they’ll never include outsiders into their inner group. This happens regardless if you can speak the same language, if you look similar (even though you’ll always look different than the “natives” and stand out), or attempt to integrate.

You’ll live fine in the country though, you’ll get a job, friends (some or most could even be locals), you’ll socialise and enjoy the country to the full extent of the law. But that’s as far as you’ll go. First generation immigrants are almost never accepted in the country where they move to. You can surround yourself with the libbiest liberals in any country and you might find a bubble where you don’t feel like an outsider, but as soon as you step out of that tiny bubble, you will feel like a foreigner again.

I am making plans to return to my home country in the next few years, it’s just money is tight and there’s like no opportunities there. But I decided that I’d rather be poor and be among people who won’t treat me like an alien, than better off but feel like I don’t belong.

Moving to another country to live there wouldn’t make you a settler unless you have / reinforce special privileges over the natives. Going to a country and integrating into their society would just make you an immigrant.

From the standpoint of being a settler and the like, I’d think it’s only an issue if you are coming into some other country and expecting their culture to change for you, rather than expecting to adapt to what their culture is, especially if the expected change revolves around western imperialist norms.

To the point of abandoning those who can’t, I think there is no single “correct” answer and you kind of have to judge based on your situation. For example, some things for a person with our kind of ideology to consider: Are you doing it for safety? For individual material convenience, with no intention of contributing to the revolutionary processes of the country you move to? In other words, do you intend to do what you can to contribute to community and to the struggle elsewhere, or is it more a tiredness and exhaustion with fighting and a desire to escape from it, similar in spirit to retreating into a fantasy world to avoid problems in RL life? The anti-imperialist struggle reaches across the whole world, so there’s no real escaping it. But people can have various good reasons for wanting to move, whether it’s going somewhere that actually accepts them or is safe for them or is something they can contribute to meaningfully that they can’t figure out how to do where they are. The imperial core does need people who know what they’re doing to fight back from within, to help protect regular folks caught up in it and especially the most marginalized groups, but it’s also a worldwide struggle, so there will always be stuff you can do somewhere, if you look for it. And for some people, it might turn out they’re more effective elsewhere than they are in the imperial core. Or they might be able to learn things from communists abroad that they can later bring back. Doesn’t necessarily have to be seen as a commitment for life.

(Mind you, I’m not asking you to answer these questions here and I know at least one point you already addressed in OP, just posing them as stuff for people to think about.)

I’ve seen some on the internet

Sounds like this is your first issue. Though you should try not to gentrify and certainly not be a settler about things if you migrate.

I don’t want to abandon people here who aren’t afforded the same privileges as me

Martyrdom also doesn’t help anyone. Also (as someone who still has empathy for the individuals, etc. and who lives here and has family/friends here) fuck the west, fuck it to oblivion. The ball is in the west’s court as to whether they will accept their place within the rest of humanity or continue trying to rule over the world as “ubermensch” thieves and genocidaires.

If you can move, and if it makes sense to you, by all means, move. Almost certainly you won’t be asking yourself these questions (hell, you’ll be regretting having had asked) if and when they come for you and you’re still around.

Canadian as well and I don’t identify as a settler (not white, though I sure as hell don’t identify as indigenous to this place- I’m not) but I can say for sure I’ll get the hell out when and if I can. Fuck this place, fuck this society (there are good individuals, but the society is rotten to the core), fuck it all. You may as well consider yourself living in Weimar Germany if you ask me (perhaps a more unhinged Weimar Germany, as this state and society has effectively no indigeneity unlike the indigenous-to-central-Europe Germans, and because they’re literally pushing for nuclear WW3 which I doubt even the mustache man would have been so mad as to provoke when MAD is on the table), shit is likely going to go down.

TBH actually seeing this reminds me of something. I’ll message you about it maybe, idk. But if you can get the hell out (and you want to and can have a better life elsewhere- which by the sounds of it you do) by all means go for it.

Once again, fuck this country.

Meh, nobody forces people to climb into walled compounds and hiring local serfs to do your bidding. You can be of the place. And bringing imperial core money (if you do do that) into periphery is net good, whatever the feelings, unless you come as imf consultant how to better sell utilities and mining rights.

I left my home country due to housing shortage over there. Wasn’t even invited to look at a house in over two years of searching. Oftentimes I was placed somewhere near spot 3000 in a raffle. Moved abroad and found a house within two months of looking.

Now, I did move to another Western country so I guess it had less of an impact than me moving to let’s say Eastern Europe.

Anyway, I actually moved towards a country with more revolutionary potential. I’ve found a marxist party to be a member of, which my home country is lacking.

I don’t know if I would call it some form of colonialism per se. I guess it depends on what you offer. If you move somewhere and take away valuable resources and opportunities from local people maybe it is. I personally moved here without a degree and even without a prospect of a job. Eventually I managed to work myself up towards a good job but I don’t think it was due to some sort of white privilege compared to locals here.

I’m a Latino Texan and I’m making plans with my grandparents and my girl to emigrate to China hopefully within the next 3-ish years, before the U.S. attacks China.

I’m gonna start learning the language soon and teaching my family what I can, while we hopefully contact embassies/lawyers and transfer social security stuff.

I wish you luck. Don’t worry about feeling like you’re running away or taking advantage of others just by moving. Not only is that most likely not true, but it’s a very unhealthy and self-sabotaging outlook. As plinky said, unless you’re like a IMF or World Bank douchebag, you’re just doing what you have to do to survive.

I think its worse when people move from the global south countries to the imperial core, its a wealth transfer after all.

Unless there’s some sort of systematic effort involving you by an organization to commit settler colonialism or do unequal exchange (read labor and resource exploitation of the foreign masses), I don’t think yer a colonizer, but at worst, gentrifier…