... I got more realistic and thought about how the UK's empire is receding and that it would be more realistic to attain secession from the British than from the USA.
That's probably the first question we'll need to ask ourselves, which
political migration scenario is more realistic:
(1) "Taking over", or rather "politically influencing" an American territory like the U.S. Virgin Islands in pretty much the same way the Free State Project is hoping to do with New Hampshire. A major advantage here is that the two can work together to lobby the U.S. Federal Government for greater independence, and there are no
Commonwealth,
CariCom (yet), or UN hoops to jump through. A disadvantage is that it's pulling all our eggs in one basket.
(2) Doing the same to a foreign (most likely British) dependency by moving in and, even more importantly, using our dollars to encourage the locals to call for independence. A similar scenario we're not discussing at this time is taking over (or buying) island(s) that are a dependency of a Latin American country. The advantage of this scenario is that there are as many possibilities as there are suitable islands in the sea. The disadvantage is that dealing with a government would be very costly, most larger islands are already populated, and getting the locals to come on board would still be as difficult as in the 3rd scenario.
(3) Taking a small island nation that's already sovereign and pulling it toward a libertarian form of government. This feels like we're starting a huge leap ahead of scenarios 1 and 2, but the choices of sovereign nations this could work with is rather limited, and in many those cases the locals depend on welfare from tourism industry taxation.
I think we should further research scenario #3 first, because it doesn't depend on the unpredictable whim of a large mainland government.
Take, for example, the nation of
Dominica (not to be confused with the much-larger Dominican Republic), the smallest sovereign economy on our list with population of 71,727 people at around $6,520 per-capita GDP - still far to large to be effectively influenced from outside. (Those numbers came from Wikipedia, while the numbers in the above table came from CIA fact book and are probably older.)
The populace almost entirely consists of descendants of African slaves with a couple thousand pre-Columbian natives. And Dominica has recently joined the "
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas", which may or may not mean the locals are as socialist as the fellow members Cuba and Venezuela, but there's a good chance those scumbags would pump in money to protect Dominica from "evil capitalist carpetbaggers" like us.
Barbados has the freest economy of the sovereign nations on the list (or at least among those that were big enough to be included in a world-wide study). The only tax seems to be a 15% sales (VAT) tax, but many things are tax-exempt or have a lower rate. All this is meaningless, of course, unless you can get a citizenship there, which currently
requires seven years of residence there. Etc.
Someone should do a feasibility study on the U.S. Virgin Islands (the only option for scenario 1 really) and the 10 sovereign nations on that list (scenario 3). If there are realistic possibilities - great, scenario 2 isn't even worth looking into. If all of them are a dead end, scenario 2 is all we'll have left.