Roamer 21: Six Impossibles and a Yes
After 35 years on American radio, Roamer 21 traded the microphone for a new life in Lisbon.
I recently sat down with Roamer 21, a former radio broadcaster who spent 35 years behind a microphone in the States before moving to Portugal two and a half years ago. Today, she’s building a new creative outlet writing on Substack, but her path to Europe and her current reality in Lisbon is filled with unpredictability and the bureaucratic hazing of moving abroad.
As she put it plainly: “Portugal is supposed to be one of the easier countries to get a visa. But it’s still difficult. It might be easier, but it’s definitely not easy.”
For Roamer 21, the pull to Europe wasn’t some sudden trend sparked by a viral TikTok trend; it was deeply ancestral. As the child of Italian immigrants, she grew up surrounded by a persistent romanticism of the old country. Her parents had left Italy after World War II out of sheer necessity—there were simply zero opportunities left. But they never stopped missing it.
“I could not wait to take my first trip across the Atlantic,” she told me. Naturally, when she and her husband decided they wanted to experience living abroad, Italy was the obvious first choice. They assumed she could secure citizenship through her heritage and call it a day.
Then they hit a brick wall. After endless conversations, an immigration official finally told her the hard truth: when her parents became naturalized American citizens decades ago, they explicitly renounced their Italian citizenship. Under the strict legal stipulations of the time, that act permanently severed the bloodline for future generations. The dream of an easy Italian passport was dead on arrival.
Refusing to let the European dream go, they pivoted. It was right before the pandemic, and the internet was buzzing with praise for Portugal’s friendly, accessible visa system. They visited once, twice, and then a third time in the dead of winter—just to make sure they still loved the place when the glamorous tourist crowds evaporated. They did. So, they packed up their lives, her husband secured a demanding remote consulting setup, and they landed in Lisbon.
Once you actually make the move, you quickly realize that the hardest part isn’t finding a flat or learning how to order a coffee without sounding like a tourist; it’s finding reliable information. Roamer 21 highlighted a universal pain point for immigrants: the crowdsourced immigration advice on social media.
“I’m on a WhatsApp group,” she says, “and there’s always that one person who, anytime anybody has a question about renewing their residency, says, “Oh, well, if you just go to this Facebook group, they have it all right there.” And of course, there’s always someone else who snaps back, “I don’t have fucking Facebook. Please don’t tell me to go fish through 550 different posts to try to find the information I need. It’s practically impossible.”
People don’t want to dig through countless Facebook comments. Instead, they want to hear from a human being they actually know and trust.
When they first arrived, the immigration agency (then known as SEF) gave them an introduction to the golden rule of European bureaucracy: Your destiny depends entirely on the mood of the person behind the desk.
Roamer 21 and her husband had appointments on the exact same day, at the exact same time, but were split up into different cubicles. It was a roll of the dice.
Roamer 21 got lucky. She sat down with a friendly, warm “grandpa type” of official. He made pleasant small talk in broken English, scanned her paperwork smoothly, tapped her card for payment, and sent her on her way.
Her husband, on the other hand, drew the short straw. He got a strict official who spoke zero English and was visibly annoyed that he didn’t speak fluent Portuguese. She began demanding random documents he didn’t legally need and to top it off, her card reader broke. She insisted his American card wouldn’t work anyway, forcing him to sprint out of the building to find an ATM in a panic while Roamer 21 and Grandpa watched comfortably from the next desk over.
“My experience was pleasant,” she laughs. “His experience was no fun at all. It just depends on who you get. You just never know.”
That initial hurdle, however, was nothing compared to the administrative ghost story they are living through right now. Having crossed the two and a half-year mark, their first residency cards expired, plunging them straight into the dreaded renewal limbo.
When they moved, they were promised a smooth online renewal process that would grant them an easy three-year extension. But in the interim, the politics in Portugal shifted. The rise of a right-wing political faction has led to a tightening of bureaucratic laws. While the anti-immigrant rhetoric is largely weaponized against specific communities, the results impact every single immigrant across the board.
Right now, they are living in an exhausting state of administrative suspended animation. Her husband received an official rejection notice for his renewal and is currently waiting on the verdict of his legal appeal. Roamer 21 hasn’t received an approval or a rejection—just total, deafening silence.
“It makes it kind of difficult to plan,” she admitted. “How much more do I want to invest in expanding my work here if they could tell me tomorrow in an email: “Sorry, you’ve got three months to vacate the country”? I don’t want to linger around without a legal visa.”
It leaves you with the deeply unsettling feeling that you have chosen Portugal as your home, but Portugal hasn’t quite decided if it wants to choose you back.
When asked if the looming threat of deportation makes them consider returning to the United States, the answer is a resolute, immediate no.
“Going back to the US would be a last resort,” Roamer 21 says, noting that whenever they visit, the exhaustion is palpable. “It just seems like everybody in the US is in a really bad mood. Everybody’s just either numb or pissed off.”
If Lisbon doesn’t work out, Plan B involves looking at other European destinations like Sweden or the UK, where they have family and friends, or potentially pouring their capital into a local business investment to trigger a different visa track.
Despite the looming clouds, 35 years on the radio have given Roamer 21 a resilient, conversational grace. She refuses to give in to the panic, leaning on a classic piece of Portuguese survival wisdom she has learned firsthand: “In this country, when you hear “no”, it just means you haven’t found the person who is going to say “yes.” You will hear “impossible, impossible, impossible” six conversations in a row, and then you’ll walk into an office, meet the right person, and they’ll say, “Oh, okay, no problem.”
Moving abroad inevitably changes your identity. You leave your established life, your career equity, and your comforts behind to start from scratch. But for those with enough resilience to survive the bureaucratic hazing, the reward is a life rewritten on your own terms—even if you have to fight the government for the right to live it.