Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers
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Why are Americans moving abroad in record numbers?
Our colleagues Drew Henshaw and Joe Parkinson both live in Europe, and they report a lot of stories together, usually about things like high-stakes hostage swaps or war in the Middle East. Here's Joe.
Our job is to travel around, normally finding the big stories that are happening across the world that Americans are interested in. Sometimes the most appealing stories you almost miss because they're hiding in plain sight.
In their day-to-day lives, Joe and Drew noticed something. They were meeting a lot of Americans, and not just tourists.
Here's Drew. We met people who are buying and selling real estate in Texas, out of Barcelona. We met someone who runs a trailer park in Florida, out of Madrid. People running investment firms out of Berlin.
So they started wondering, was this just a coincidence or were more Americans uprooting their lives to move abroad? Joe and Drew started reporting. They reached out to the governments of more than 40 countries, from Albania to Vietnam. And ultimately, they found that the answer was yes.
America has always been a country of immigration, a land that people move to. But last year, for the first time since the 1930s, more people left than moved in. And there's this really interesting undercurrent, which is that the number of Americans who are leaving the U.S. to go live in foreign lands and work and retire and go to school there is rising. And it is rising really fast.
And even more Americans want to leave. In 2008, Gallup found that 1 in 10 Americans wanted to move out of the U.S. Last year, it was 1 in 5.
It poses elemental questions for America, which has always prided itself as a destination. But in some ways, it's also a collapse of faith because there's an affordability crisis. People are trying to avoid health care costs and housing costs. And also, I think people are just hungry for something different, some different way of living.
This story is about, in a way, challenging some of the foundational ideas of America and its story as a country of immigration. It just kind of blew my mind.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 2nd. Coming up on the show, the American exodus.
When Joe and Drew started looking into this question of Americans moving abroad, they found that there weren't any statistics that they could easily go and get.
So here's what's really interesting. America, we conceive of our country as one of immigration to such a degree that our government doesn't keep statistics on the number of Americans who leave. In fact, if you go to the State Department and ask, how many Americans live abroad? You get like this, I don't know, it's like the numbers anywhere from 4 million to 9 million. It's all over the map.
They basically had to piece it together for themselves based on incomplete data from the U.S. government and elsewhere. One piece of data they did have is the number of deportations that have taken place under the Trump administration. Last year, the U.S. removed 675,000 non-citizens. And many more foreign-born residents chose to leave.
But hidden within that is another story, which is perhaps more surprising and perhaps even has a longer historical impact. And that is that more Americans are choosing to leave of their own volition, natural-born Americans.
Drew and Joe found through their reporting that at least 180,000 Americans moved out of the U.S. last year. And they say that's likely a huge undercount. And so why are so many Americans leaving?
People tend to read this politically. And you've got some commentators that have labeled this wave of American immigrants the, quote, Donald Dash, since the numbers have really just risen under President Trump's second term. But what we find is this is a phenomenon that's been building for years. Trump's reelection, like, yes, that was a factor for many, but for others not. And there's plenty of expats who voted for him. There's something as a deeper structural shift that's causing this.
This shift started before the COVID pandemic, but it really exploded during that time.
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