Privateers Under Kleptocratic Equity Scams (PUKES)
The Happiness of Strangers?
It is an odd day when the British Broadcasting Corporation, that former monument to public reason, decides to inform its readers that Asia is the happiest place on Earth—at least if you are an expatriate with a laptop and a flexible visa.
The source for this revelation is not the United Nations or the World Bank, but a curious online club called InterNations . org, where the globally mobile rate their host nations as if reviewing a hotel. From these data—uncontrolled, unverified, and unashamedly self-selected—the BBC concludes that Asia has achieved a kind of economic nirvana. One imagines the editorial meeting: Forget the recession, forget Gaza and Ukraine—our readers want to know where gin is cheap and Wi-Fi works.
The survey in question, grandly titled the Expat Insider 2025 Report, claims to represent 172 nationalities. It does not explain how many of those respondents were living in London flats versus Chiang Mai co-working spaces. Yet its findings are recited as fact. Five of the world’s “top ten expat destinations,” we are told, are in Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, China, Indonesia and Malaysia. In the small print, however, the list begins not with Asia at all, but with Panama, Colombia, and Mexico—three nations whose histories of colonial exploitation and modern inequality could fill a shelf of human tragedy.
It is tempting to ask why these particular countries have suddenly become so “happy” for foreigners. The answer, of course, lies in the arithmetic of empire. When centuries of extraction have cheapened labour, land and governance, a later generation may enjoy the fruits at bargain rates. What looks to the BBC like “affordability” is, to the student of history, merely the discount price of injustice.
1. Panama
Panama ranks first, perhaps because it perfected the art of serving foreign masters. Built by French ambition and American might, the Canal remains a global corridor of unearned rents. The expat today inherits the same privilege once claimed by the colonial engineer—duty-free gin instead of gunboats, yet the logic is unchanged: foreigners in command, locals in service.
2. Colombia
Colombia’s hospitality is legendary, its inequality more so. Decades of conflict, displacement and narcotic economics have kept wages docile and real estate inviting. The modern expatriate sips coffee grown by peasants who will never afford it, congratulating themselves on “living authentically.”
3. Mexico
Mexico is that eternal paradox of proximity: close enough to the United States to supply it, distant enough to remain cheap. The InterNations survey praises its “friendliness” and “quality of life.” Orwell might have translated that as servility and sunshine—qualities long demanded of the tropics by their northern consumers.
4. Thailand
Thailand has perfected the smile as social policy. The Western retiree or remote worker perceives serenity; the local perceives an economy so dependent on foreign wallets that entire provinces are shaped by their appetites. In the survey, expats cited “ease of settling in.” History explains why: nations trained to receive colonisers learn quickly to receive tourists.
5. Vietnam
Vietnam is the strangest inclusion of all. Having repelled both French and American empires, it now welcomes their descendants, armed with smartphones instead of rifles. The global market has achieved what armies could not—peace through property. “Affordable healthcare,” notes the survey; one doubts whether that applies equally to the factory worker making the foreigner’s sneakers.
6. China
That China ranks sixth should not surprise anyone. It has mastered the capitalist trick of selling both labour and nationalism. To the expat, it offers high salaries and infrastructure; to the Party, it offers proof that foreigners still covet its growth. In Orwell’s terms, it is the new super-state—simultaneously feared and admired, trading ideology for obedience.
7. United Arab Emirates
If happiness could be built from glass, Dubai would be its cathedral. The UAE’s expat utopia rests on imported labour stripped of rights. Yet in the InterNations survey, the gilded minority declares itself “content.” One might recall Orwell’s phrase: “A fat man eating a meal does not notice the thin man watching through the window.”
8. Indonesia
Indonesia’s appeal, like its archipelago, is scattered: beaches for the remote worker, cheap nannies for the expatriate family, and silence from the state so long as the money flows. Environmental collapse is merely background noise to the yoga retreat. The BBC calls it “vibrant.” That is a polite word for over-developed.
9. Spain
Spain’s presence on the list offers a touch of nostalgia. Here the coloniser becomes the retiree, drawn to the same sun that once burned the New World. Spanish youth emigrate north to find work while Northern pensioners migrate south to find warmth—a perfect symmetry of modern European decay.
10. Malaysia
Malaysia closes the list as a model of “multiculturalism.” It is indeed multicultural in the same way a plantation was: distinct races, fixed hierarchies, and an economy lubricated by foreign capital. The BBC praises its “English proficiency.” The legacy of empire, it seems, is now a selling point.
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That these rankings should be reported uncritically by The BBC is comic in the classical sense: laughter tinged with disbelief. For what the article calls expat happiness is merely a new vocabulary for the oldest form of privilege—the ability to move freely while others remain trapped. One wonders how the results would look if the survey asked not the expatriates but the citizens among whom they live. Would Panamanians, Colombians or Thais agree that their countries are “top ten destinations” for anyone other than the lucky few?
The irony deepens when one recalls the subtitle of Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Their argument—that nations fail when institutions serve elites rather than citizens—applies equally well to this expat fantasia. The nations that succeed in the InterNations survey are precisely those that fail in moral accounting: places where foreign wealth substitutes for domestic equity. In effect, the happiness of expats is the statistical shadow of the unhappiness of others.
Perhaps The BBC’s editors know this. Perhaps they, too, sense the unease in publishing a travel brochure disguised as journalism. But like the empires it once chronicled, the Corporation survives by telling its audience what it wishes to hear: that comfort is attainable, that the world remains open for business, that the sun still shines on those who can afford to chase it.
And so we arrive at the paradox of our age: the global citizen, liberated by technology and cheap flights, remains imprisoned by the oldest lie of all—that happiness can be purchased abroad, that freedom begins with a boarding pass. The Expat Insider survey merely quantifies that delusion, and The BBC, in dutiful service, broadcasts it to the world.
The result is not journalism but a mirror: the smiling face of privilege, reflected in the glass towers of history.
Drunken Faun, National Archeological Museum of Spain (7 October, 2025)