If you can support yourself financially, come. If not, life will be hard

If you can support yourself financially, come. If not, life will be hard

If you can support yourself financially, come. If not, life will be hard

The first advantage: you can get temporary residency simply because you want it and have no trouble with the law.
The second advantage: once you have permanent residency, getting a permit to purchase and possess firearms is fairly easy.
That’s where the advantages end.

The downsides:

First, this is Latin America. People still get mugged at knifepoint, have their phones stolen, and have their homes raided by organised groups carrying firearms. Yes, this happens very infrequently. Yes, living in a decent neighbourhood in a large city is enough to avoid it.
Except there is... one such city in the entire country. The capital. Outside it, especially in rural areas, the most you can expect from the police is the local equivalent of a pot-bellied village constable. If you are being robbed or murdered, they will be of no help to you personally.

Second, the banks. Their provincial nature, limited to the needs of a small country, really shows. AFTER you get temporary residency and a local ID, which currently takes between three and eight months, you can only open a basic local savings account. You cannot receive SWIFT transfers into it or keep more than roughly $1,000 in local currency in it until you provide documentation justifying a higher limit. The only thing that works 100% is six monthly tax returns with the taxes paid. Foreign bank statements, contracts and invoices are all a waste of time. The bank staff reviewing applications genuinely freeze up when they see things like that, and opening an account, whether personal or business, goes nowhere. There are cases of accounts taking two weeks, two months, a year and so on to open. I won’t even get into the accessibility and usability of local banking apps.

Third, the local population. “Tranquilo, mañana” is their motto in life. Unreliability, no focus on results, and no sense of responsibility for their actions or their work await you everywhere in daily life. And this is no exaggeration: they are ALL like that. The general approach is to prioritise social connections over achieving anything. So everyone is everyone’s friend, and holding friends accountable for results just isn’t the done thing.

Fourth, healthcare and education. Healthcare is bad because education is bad, and education is bad because, well, see point three. Pharmaceuticals fall into the same category. The government considers its handful of generic drug factories a source of pride and actively keeps original foreign medicines out of the country’s licensed market. Local medicines are Russian roulette. Whether a particular drug will work is anyone’s guess. Apart from people who have already tried those pills, nobody can tell you whether they had any effect. For anything serious, you have to go to Brazil or Chile and pay out of pocket. If you want to move here with children, make sure they are all healthy and strong, because the only thing here that might improve their health is constant access to sunshine.

Fifth, architecture. I don’t mean how attractive it is, but that locals don’t know how to build houses or apartment buildings. Thermal insulation, soundproofing, insulation against heat transfer through the ground, insect-proofing: they haven’t the faintest idea what any of this is. They didn’t know 50 years ago, they didn’t know 20 years ago, and they still don’t know today. I’ve lived in a new “luxury” apartment building, an old house and a 20-year-old apartment building. All three had exactly the same problems, to exactly the same extent. The insect problem, at least, can be solved by renting or buying an apartment very high up, on the fifth floor or above, preferably three or four metres above the treetops.

Sixth, the local “circadian” rhythms. People get up before dawn, start their full working day at 7 a.m. and stop doing anything consciously at 1 p.m. Unconscious activity may continue until 6 p.m., but it achieves nothing. So if you live near a reasonably busy road, a school, a kindergarten or anything similar, bear in mind that Sunday will be your only chance for a proper lie-in.

Seventh, the local labour market. The average salary is around $500. That is also the minimum. And the maximum for 99% of jobs. Nobody will pay you more to work for someone else unless you work for one of the local IT sweatshops, where it can reach $1,000, are a high-ranking government official, or hold a senior position at a large local company. In case it isn’t immediately obvious, none of those options is available to an immigrant with either temporary or permanent residency. One consequence is that nobody is particularly attached to their job. They don’t care about their work because they know they can find another equally lousy job anywhere within a week.

Eighth, rents. See above for the quality of the housing stock. Prices are higher than even in the capital of neighbouring Brazil. This is because the capital is currently experiencing a construction boom, and some investors are buying newly built properties hoping to rent them out for big money to the gradually increasing number of newcomers. Until the number of apartments that have just been built, bought as investments and put up for rent stops growing, don’t expect long-term rents to fall.

Ninth, access to the conveniences of 21st-century life. In short, there is none. Modern materials, consumer goods, equipment and appliances, apart from electronics such as phones and TVs, clothing and footwear are practically nonexistent. Want new CrossFit shoes, a decent reverse-osmosis filter for your kitchen, or modern materials to insulate your house? Order them abroad and wait for delivery. There is nowhere to buy them here. You can only get what you might call the “previous generation”. Even the air conditioners mostly sold and installed here overheat or get too cold and have to shut down periodically to avoid breaking. And this is a country where temperatures of +40°C and +50°C are quite possible at certain times. An additional detail: there is even “local” appliance manufacturing. In practice, they buy generic mass-market products from China, put their own badge on them and sell them as “made in Paraguay”. You can’t even find instruction manuals online, never mind reliability, ease of use or smart features.

Tenth, personal information, specifically the number and details of your cédula, the main identity document. Locals don’t consider this information private. They freely give the number at the checkout for tax-deduction purposes. It is requested anywhere you need to register for anything, and the associated information is retrieved automatically from registries, even if you don’t want that. So wherever identification really matters, they use your fingerprint or your face. Yes, even at the gym. Keep that in mind.

Edited translation · Русский