Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

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. Census Bureau. 

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 reporter, based in Europe: What was it like, living over there? She too was thinking about moving.

An American tale

The 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.”