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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: What factors are driving the American exodus?
But even with full-time jobs, between groceries, housing, and childcare for their two young kids, their everyday expenses could be a burden. And on top of that, there was healthcare.
We had a big overhead for health insurance. We were paying, I think, at any given time, between $12 and $15 a month in Los Angeles for health insurance.
$1,500.
$1,500. Sorry, what did I say?
Fifteen.
Oh, fifteen. Sorry. Fifteen dollars. Yeah, it was a burden. No, fifteen hundred dollars. And even with health insurance, you know, our son had to go to the emergency room for a high fever and the ambulance wasn't covered by our health insurance. And it was a five thousand dollar bill. You know, luckily everything was OK. But those kinds of things can, you know, set a family back financially.
These kinds of concerns over health care costs were something Drew and Joe heard about a lot in their interviews.
Healthcare, 100%. I spoke to a dad, he's also a software engineer, who was saying, I realized if I just canceled my American health insurance, moved to Spain, bought local health insurance, I could use the difference to put my kids into one of the top schools in the whole country.
And it's not just the cost of living. The LeBlancs, they were just feeling overwhelmed by an American culture of hustling all the time just to keep up.
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Chapter 3: How has remote work influenced Americans relocating?
I asked them to put a number on their new budget. Our budget is, we're around $100,000 a year. That's what we can live off of comfortably, which that was not really sustainable for us to do in LA. For us, we're able to do that and still save money and still live what I would say is a much fuller, richer life here than we were able to do in Los Angeles.
Part of that richer life is simply working less. Michael now mostly freelances rather than working nine to five. Meanwhile, Stephanie has changed careers. She now works in relocation services, helping other expats move to Portugal. Our colleague Joe mentioned that this field of relocation services is now booming.
The number of Americans leaving is rising so fast that there's a whole kind of subsector of the economy that's growing to try and cater to their needs. And a bunch of relocation companies have sprouted up. And a lot of them have a branding that caters to a particular demographic.
Lux Nomads, for example, is a company for the well-to-do. GTFO Tours caters to Trump critics, and She Hit Refresh targets the biggest boom market of all, women. A Gallup poll last year found that 40% of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 would like to permanently move overseas if possible. But Europeans aren't necessarily so excited about their new neighbors.
It's not like the American influx is a uniformly positive, welcomed, you know, dynamic across Europe. It's becoming increasingly controversial because Europe's suffering from a similar cost of living crisis, particularly in housing. And it's very easy to blame the international people who are moving and happy to pay a premium for their housing for the escalating cost in that area.
So, you know, you have seen a backlash here. In Ponta do Sul, rents rose 30% in just one year. I was practically pushed out of the neighborhood where I used to live. And now I feel pushed out of Lisbon itself. As if the city were rejecting me.
Still, Americans continue to be drawn abroad. And not just to Western Europe.
Three months ago, we moved from the U.S. to Mexico, and here's three things we stopped doing since moving to Mexico. I wake up thinking, did I really just move myself and my three children to a different country? Out of our life in Florida all the way to Albania.
Even celebrities are promoting an international lifestyle to their followers online.
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