Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers
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.
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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, s ched 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.
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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, s ched 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.
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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.
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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.
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