https://www.wsj.com/us-news/americans-leaving-the-us-migration-a5795bfa?mod=hp_lead_pos8
In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last
year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred
since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The
Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the
fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new
visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however,
lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in
record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they
find more affordable and safe. Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn’t collected comprehensive
statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence
permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics
from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their
feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying,
telecommuting and retiring overseas.The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up
apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own
language—not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy
Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors,
higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the
19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and
Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars
have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of
gentrification.More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable
university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican
border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care. On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company,
almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania. The
former Stalinist state offers a special visa allowing U.S. citizens to
live and work there, with no tax on foreign income for a year, no
questions asked.“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,”
said Expatsi founder Jen Barnett, a 54-year-old Alabama native who moved
to Yucatán, Mexico, in 2024. “Now they’re ordinary people, like me,” she said as she ticked through
growth numbers. In 2024 the company organized three group scouting trips
for clients; this year it will be 57, she said: “Our goal is to move
one million Americans.”]\



Some commentators have labeled this wave of American emigrants the “Donald
Dash” since numbers have spiked under President Trump’s second term. But
the phenomenon has been building for years—fed by the rise of remote
work, mounting living costs and an appetite for foreign lifestyles that
feel within reach, especially in Europe. A White House spokesman said the U.S. economy is far outpacing other
developed nations and the Trump administration policies were deporting
hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and attracting “countless
ultra-high net worth foreigners,” who are “shelling out $1 million for a
Gold Card to come settle in the United States.”The U.S. experienced net negative migration—an estimated loss of some
150,000 people—in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026,
according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy
think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S.
data doesn’t yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings
analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7
million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023.The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million “self-deportations” last
year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial
2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them—a number
likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.  There is no single data set that precisely registers the estimated 4 to 9
million Americans already living outside the U.S. The State Department
estimated 1.6 million lived in Mexico in 2022, a number that has likely
grown in the postpandemic years—although recent cartel violence has
unnerved some expats. Canada’s count, at more than 250,000, doesn’t
fully capture dual citizenship, or the flow of Americans whose daily
lives straddle the border. The U.K. hosts more than 325,000—part of the
more than 1.5 million now living in Europe, per the Association of
Americans Resident Overseas, a Paris-based nonprofit.
The figures that exist likely undercount, overlooking locals born to an
American parent, students on long-term visas or others exploiting a
common loophole: arriving on 90-day tourist visas, leaving for a day to
reset and returning for another three months. But a vast and fragmented
pile of immigration statistics, stitched together by the Journal,
depicts a historic pattern.In nearly all of the European Union’s 27 member states, the number of
Americans arriving to live and work is at a record and rising. The total
living in Portugal has jumped more than 500% since the Covid pandemic
and grew by 36% in 2024 alone, official data there showed. In the past
10 years, the number of American residents has nearly doubled in Spain
and the Netherlands, and more than doubled in the Czech Republic. Last year, more Americans moved to Germany than Germans moved to America.
The same was true in Ireland, which welcomed 10,000 people from the U.S.
in 2025, about double those who came in 2024. If there was any thought that this was a fleeting pandemic-era experiment
of laptop nomads logging in from distant shores, data hints at its
longevity. The U.S. government has a monthslong backlog of Americans
asking to renounce their citizenship, either to secure a foreign
passport or to avoid taxation of their earnings abroad. In 2024,
requests jumped 48% and likely outpaced that in 2025, immigration firms
say.Americans are applying for British citizenship at the highest rate since records
began in 2004: some 6,600 in the year to March 2025. They are securing
Irish passports at a record pace: 31,825 in 2024, and an estimated
40,000 last year.Meanwhile, some 50,000 U.S.-born Mexican-Americans moved across the border to work
last year, according to a Mexican government survey cited by the U.S.
The booming number of new relocation companies say they’re struggling to
keep up with demand. They include LuxNomads for the well-to-do; GTFO
Tours, attracting Trump critics; Blaxit Global, for Black Americans, and
SheHitRefresh, for the biggest boom market of all, women. A Gallup poll
last year found 40% of American women, ages 15-44, would like to
permanently move overseas, if possible. By comparison, in 2023, the same
pollster found that a slightly smaller proportion of sub-Saharan
Africans—37%—wished to do the same.Relocation agencies say their new clients go far beyond young adventurers on
European sojourns or their retiring parents. They include Midwestern
small-business owners—architects, financial advisers and
engineers—saving on healthcare costs by living seven time zones east of
their clients. Middle-aged divorcées are looking for a fresh start and
Americans on disability or social security are trying to stretch their
benefits.Strikingly, the new American migrant is more likely than ever to bring children in
tow, relocation companies and realtors say, laying down roots and
raising a set of Americans feeding into foreign colleges.“You don’t face the prospect of your 5-year-old going into a kindergarten
and doing an active shooter drill,” said Chris Ford, 41, who works for a
Dallas real-estate investment firm while helping run a kids’ baseball
league in Berlin, whose roster has doubled in size for each of the past
three years. “The wages are higher in the U.S. but the quality of life
is higher in Europe.”The exodus poses elemental questions for a country that has always prided
itself as a destination. Are the new American emigrants a credit to the
strength of their homeland’s economy? After all, it is America’s
enviable salaries that allow a new class of students, remote workers and
retirees to finance a second chapter abroad, their wages and stock
gains powered by the Silicon Valley juggernauts dominating the global
economy. 



Or do these émigrés personify a loss of faith in America’s future and way
of life? Across dozens of interviews, U.S. expats described their
motivations as a tangle of economic incentives, lifestyle preferences
and disenchantment with the trajectory of America, citing violent crime,
cost of living and turbulent politics. Trump’s re-election was a factor
for many—although others voted for him. But the structural and societal
shift runs much deeper. When Gallup asked Americans during the 2008
recession how many wanted to leave the U.S., the answer was one in 10.
Last year: One in five.“It undercuts this American exceptionalism, ‘we have the best quality of
life, we’re the best country in the world, everyone wants to move
here,’” said Caitlin Joyce, one of two researchers at Temple University
who have spent years studying the trend. “Well, Americans move abroad
and find they like life better abroad. They like the social democratic
policies.”At the end of the interview, she posed a question to a Journal eporter,
based in Europe: What was it like, living over there? She too was
thinking about moving.An American taleThe last time more people left the U.S. than moved in, according to Census
historical statistics, it was 1935 and the destination of choice was the
Soviet Union. More than 100,000 Americans applied to work the tractor
plants, steel mills and factories of a communist dictatorship. The
newcomers played baseball in Moscow’s Gorky Park—others were later
imprisoned in gulags. So many unskilled Americans descended on the
U.S.S.R. that by 1938 the Soviets started requiring U.S. visitors to
show proof of return travel.
These days, the social democracies of Europe are luring Americans. Their
governments have eased visa rules and passed tax codes that let U.S.
citizens experience Europe on American-style tax rates.The bargain: The U.S. has larger salaries, mobile talent and millions of
citizens craving a better life. Europe needs such workers—and their
income—to prop up a pension system so top-heavy that French retirees now
outearn working age adults, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a
research agency. European salaries are constrained by high taxes and
low growth. Retailers, restaurants and real-estate agents want foreign
clientele.  In return, Europe offers inexpensive healthcare, walkable cities dotted
with sidewalk bistros and co-working spaces where English has displaced
the local tongue. Housing in many cities remains comparatively cheap and
plentiful. Schools are affordable, safe and, excluding universities,
generally higher-rated than America’s. The arrivals are a counterpoint to the looming Euro-American geopolitical
divorce, as the Trump administration and its richest backers sour on the
trans-Atlantic alliance. To many conservatives, Europe is a stagnant
economy of suffocating taxes and repressive regulation that is pushing
its most successful citizens away: More than 18,000 millionaires left
Europe last year, while the U.S. attracted 7,500, according to a report
by Henley & Partners, a relocation consulting firm. And yet a
growing subset of the U.S. top tech and finance talent is dialing in
from Southern Europe.One Texan fintech specialist, watching his son play on a Madrid square some
locals have nicknamed “Plaza U.S.A.,” expressed elation that, by simply
buying European private health insurance and canceling his American
plan, he saved enough to afford tuition at one of the capital’s elite
schools.“Many Americans come and there are many love stories,” said Spanish
government spokeswoman Elma Saiz Delgado, whose hometown of Pamplona
brings in Americans who know it from the annual bullrunning festival
chronicled by Ernest Hemingway. “After four glasses of wine, they stay.”



In his rallies, Trump has mused about attracting Norwegian immigrants. But
the number of Norwegians living in the U.S. has fallen over the past 10
years, and in 2024, it crossed a symbolic milestone: There are now more
natural-born Americans living in Norway than Norwegian-born residents
in the U.S. 
Evidence is mounting that the draw of expatriate life extends beyond the cost of
living. Last year the dollar weakened 12% against the euro, yet the
influx of new U.S. residents accelerated in all of the large euro
countries—France, Italy, Spain, Germany—and continued in smaller nations
like Slovenia and Portugal.“I wasn’t expecting to be surrounded by this many Americans,” said Michael
Le Blanc, a 56-year-old former creative producer at Adobe and Paramount
now freelancing from Lisbon, as he bought a hefty plastic bottle of
Hidden Valley ranch dressing and Pillsbury Funfetti cake mix at one of
the city’s American stores. “I’m trying to learn the language but it’s a
real challenge.” He moved with his two children after the second active shooter scare at
his 8-year-old son’s Los Angeles school. In the six months since, his
wife, Stephanie, a 42-year-old academic adviser in the U.S., has found
work selling Lisbon real estate to incoming Americans. Some 58% of
foreign buyers in Portugal are from the U.S., and house prices have
doubled in five years in some of the upmarket historical districts. Politicians on prime-time shows in Portugal and Spain earnestly debate how to
ensure that locals aren’t disadvantaged by the new wave of foreign
residents. In Barcelona, a black graffiti scrawl has appeared on a long
gray wall: “Digital Nomads go home!”On one of the city’s tree-lined plazas, Lia Mashaka runs a business
helping Americans move to the Mediterranean city, from navigating visas
to finding a pediatrician. Many arrive telling themselves they’ll only
spend a year, she said—but “I’ve never had a client that has chosen to
go back to the U.S.”In 2024, her husband, Akida, opened the Barcelona High School, an American
school, thinking it would help their son move to the U.S. after
graduation. Instead, he chose Madrid’s IE University, which now has as
many American students as Spaniards. On a recent morning at Barcelona
High, 30 new families were on a lower floor for an orientation. Workers
were preparing three upper floors to accommodate a student body set to
reach 600 in September, up from 300 two years ago. 



“We used to have most families coming from New York state or California,”
said Amanda Slefo, the school director. “Now we have Alaska, Utah,
Texas, Colorado, Kentucky.”The pipeline Social media is feeding into the emigration economy, with dozens of
influencers demystifying the process. Kacie Rose, a former professional
dancer, shares vignettes of her new life in Italy that she compiled into
a bestselling memoir, “You Deserve Good Gelato.” On Instagram,
Kelis—the R&B star known for singing “my milkshake brings all the
boys to the yard”—regales 3 million followers with quick videos on the
opportunities she says await Black Americans ready to follow her by
moving to Kenya. The number of U.S.-based academics seeking jobs overseas rose by more than a
fifth last year, according to Times Higher Education, a U.K.-based
provider of global education data. Most of them landed in Europe, where
the EU has set aside 500 million euros to lure top scientists to the
continent. Professors teaching abroad blamed the American right for
slashing research funding, and the left for policing university speech.International students coming to America fell by 17% last fall and is expected to
decline more quickly in years to come—while the cohort of Americans
obtaining a degree in Europe has doubled from 2011, rising 14% last year
alone in the U.K., according to UCAS, the British university admissions
service. Prince William’s alma mater, Scotland’s elite University of St. Andrews,
receives so many Americans it is now sometimes referred to as
“mini-Nantucket.”Of the 12 American students the Journal spoke to for this story, studying
across Spain, Scotland and England, only one planned to return to the
U.S. “I’m of the perspective where I don’t really mind if I’m busing tables in
London or something if I’m jetting off to Oslo or Berlin or Copenhagen
on the weekend,” said Brody Wilkes, a second-year St. Andrews student
from Santa Monica, Calif. “I think that’s a way of life that I would
much prefer over trying to grind a corporate job in the U.S. or working
in L.A. and dealing with crazy home prices and things like that.”Buffalo, N.Y., native Kelly McCoy had been struggling to make ends meet on her
$80,000 salary as an insurance analyst until she moved to Albania in the
summer of 2024 to take advantage of its American visa. (When she
arrived, she hung her home team’s flag, reading “Bills Mafia,” on her
balcony, drawing confused looks from neighbors in a country battling
organized crime.) She likes to tell the story of how, after she was
treated for a concussion and a broken arm at a local hospital, she
wandered the halls confused why nobody was trying to charge her.McCoy, 45, has since relocated to Romania and works as a consultant helping
other Americans with more limited means join the emigrant wave. “You’ll
still find people saying only rich people can do this. I have had 15
American clients move to Albania that have been on social security or
disability or both,” she said.“In Albania, you can very easily right now survive on $1,000 a month,” she
added. “I have another consultation with someone tonight.”

Didn't read.......op is gay

Willing to bet most of these "Americans" are recent "migrants."

Anyways with the mass flooding of new arrivals, the last thing America needs to worry about is too few people immigrating.

i'm trying to get my italian citizenship

Leaving or getting deported?

This is what I voted for

good.

we need to shed another 50 million beanboys and muzzragheads, but especially the street chitters.


AMerica needs to get back down to 200 million proud americans, with zero america haters, and zero leeches.


SRS

lol, these are white people who are leaving. Middle and upper class moving to Portugal, Spain, France and Germany.

Who is going to replace them? You guys having lots of kids?

Get ready to learn Chinese buddy.

pls go

Honestly I'd welcome the Chinese if they were the ones mass-immigrating and not a bunch of low IQ 3'rd worlders, but I think we all know who has actually been flooding into the country lately.

Thanks for that op

We're definitely going to read all that

lol at thinking chinese aren't 3rd world.

The rich ones already have property here and their kids are in university.

We will be getting the data center chinese who will take a bath with your garden hose.

Big difference between poor Chinese people and some straight up old-world islamists from some backwards nation that has nothing going for it. China is a modern first world country, sure it has a lot of poor people but that doesn't change how developed it is or it's standing in the world.

If they are going to university and working at data centers, it sounds like they aren't just going to live off welfare and demand handouts.

"China is a modern first world country" - lol the vast majority of Chinese earn about $5k per year.

Go to NYC, go check out how disgusting Chinatown is and get back to us.

The Chinese are bred to be miserable and they take it out on everyone.

Imagine 3 generations of "Americans" where they don't want to even learn English and live 8 people to a 1 bedroom apartment.

Dude I get it, you're one of those weirdos who is really defensive of today's left wing immigration agenda.

Chinese people prove that the idea that crime is about poverty and lack of fathers is completely cope.

If you subject Chinese people to poverty, they spit on sidewalks and cut in lines and take all the crab legs at buffets. What they don't do is rob convenience stores and sag their pants and deal drugs on street corners.

Exactly. Asian gangsters and degenerates are always an exception, not a standard.

TL;DR

Hell yeah, lets get these America hating commie leftist phaggots leave. What will be funny is when they learn how hard it is to move to other countries and how they also have immigration law and that they also actively enforce it.

"But I was told I would get all sorts of free stuff and benefits, why is over half my money going to taxes, and I was told America is a racist backwards country for having immigration enforcement, why are they coming after me and deporting me here?!"

Reality always hits modern libs hard because everything they think is based on lies and cherry picked narratives.

I'm on a bunch of different expat groups on fb and I've seen a lot of middle age retirees bringing their families to Italy, Portugal and Spain. Also an insane amount of Veterans with retirement or medical pensions are bailing from the US. I've even seen black veterans inquiring about moving to Liberia srs. The people leaving are not the newcomers and Americans are getting psyopped to bail

Retirement abroad is getting more common because of the lower cost of living and even laid back lifestyle. Yep, keep letting 3rd world immigrants in who will cost more in resources than they will ever contribute and drive up cost of resources, and have our producers take their money somewhere else. Reading that if you have a medical procedure you can go to Turkey and get as good if not better medical care there for a fraction of the price. Prices are jacked up here because the hospitals/medical facilities have to charge more because of all the people who never pay. You have say $200K saved up in your 401K, good luck trying to retire on that, but you can go to another country and live well for that.

IDK if it's a psyop.

100% VA disability or even an enlisted pension as a 20 year E-6 is not quite enough to live a good life in the US. You're going to have to get another job.

If you move to Portugal or Japan or Mexico you don't need a job and $3,000 a month has you living like a king.

Seems like a rational choice for a lot of these guys.

I work with pilots who make decent money and I've been surprised by the number of guys who say f--- this, I'm moving to Japan when my commitment is over. These are educated guys with good earning power.

The USA is still a great country if you're rich but the bar for "rich" gets higher every year. You need something like $200,000 to live an upper-middle-class lifestyle with a family even in LCOL areas these days after all the housing, daycare, health care, and education inflation. Why put up with that shit when you can move to Portugal, work 1/2 as hard at your job, and live the same kind of life?

As a bonus the women are skinnier, have better values, and generally just more receptive to men abroad. I love my current (American) GF, however she's in the top 1% of women and finding her was like winning the lottery.

To me it feels like in the last 10 years the US has slowly morphed into a low-tax opportunity zone for rich people, rather than any kind of functioning state. The debt is out of control with both parties basically handing out (your) helicopter money from the treasury to favored voting groups. Most people are turning extremely selfish and there is very little sense of community or being "an American" anymore. People under 30 are basically getting bent over and fucked dry by the boomer class with them voting all sorts of tax breaks for themselves, all paid for by the next generation who can't afford houses unless they have family help or are in the top 20% by income.

Yeah I'd honestly like to move to Japan myself by this point. Very conservative and based society, opposed to globohomo, super clean and safe, great culture and great food, very respectful and polite people, and the women have feminine personalities and great bodies. Seems like such a great place compared to just about anywhere in the west these days. Only problem is how I would have to learn Japanese to go anywhere outside of a big city.

More american retardedness clearly showing through posts here. America is a filthy third world country as well lmfao... I've seen vids of chicago, LA, new york, midwest and all those rural areas .... Its a literal dump, no better than India. I can guarantee you the Chinese cities are far more cleaner and advanced compared to the best city you guys have. China is a legit modern first world country, but yeah they do have their rural areas as well ..... I know ya'll muricans are ignorant and uneducated as fuck when it comes to knowing about the rest of the world, but jeezus christo at you guys lmfao.

Did not read a single word but good luck migrating to another country that’s actually worth living in. Unlike America most civilized countries don’t accept refugees.

Libturds and illegals maybe...