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.
I personally know two people that have left so I’m not surprised.
I mean I would if my support system didn’t have serious roots here.
If I was single you bet I would.
But being married with children it’s a lot harder to do that.
I would go if anyone wanted me, but I’m not rich enough or smart enough, so I’ll have to take my chances with the MAGAs. Looks like being a Revolutionary is in my future.
Countries like New Zealand are absolutely falling over themselves to bring in trades and medical professionals. I nearly replanted myself there.
I mean, yeah?
I wonder if just like Brits and French, Unitedstaters emigrating elsewhere will call themselves “expats” instead of immigrants.
We, white people of the west, can go anywhere in the world for work, affordability and/or safety without considering ourselves immigrants.
Many years ago I was chatting with someone from Malmö. He was complaining how immigrants were “taking over his city”. But when I mentioned that I, a Canadian, would also like to move to Sweden, he told me it would be fine, that he would not consider me “an immigrant” because I’m from the west.
Anyway, I understand why anyone would want to leave. It’s just that it seems the vocabulary used is different for different people.
They already do that in Mexico, they call themselves expats in their Facebook groups and complain about the locals
An expat is not an immigrant. An immigrant emigrates to a different country, like my mother who was born in Venezuela but earned her citizenship in the USA. An expat is somebody who moves to another country for work temporarily, and does NOT emigrate. Think of immigration as permanent and expat as temporary (think work visa for a few years then back home, or transfered somewhere else)
Oh a migrant gotcha
We just left the US at the beginning of the year, and so we’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot. The short answer is, before we thought about it, we were referring to ourselves as “expats.” But just last week I saw someone online mention that, as a rule, people moving from rich countries are called “expats” while people moving to rich countries are called “immigrants.”
That one did my head in a bit. Had to rethink some stuff.
It might be assumed that it is easier for people within Western countries to assimilate in another Western country? It’s often not actually true, I imagine, and probably really comes down to the individual.
No, it’s racism. Always has been.
I’m an American immigrant in Germany. It’s infuriating how many Germans complain to me about immigrants, then when hearing that I’m an immigrant, wave their hand and say I’m not like the others. I’m now a German teacher and married to a German, so they’ve always got plausible deniability that it’s about language or integration, but I wasn’t always good at German and I only met my husband after a few years here. It used to be much more fun to push back on why.
Try immigrating to Canada from the US. Nobody here would ever consider me a ‘true’ immigrant, even though that is quite literally what I am.
I moved for school and never came back. All my family and personal ties were left behind in the states. Except for my family and the annoying need to file taxes every year for some fucking reason, I have no ties left to the US.
But Im white and culturally similar enough that the label ‘immigrant’ would feel funny to people here. It really is wacky.
Why pay taxes to the US? Is it an extraditable offense?
You have to file taxes with the US, most people with US citizenship living outside the US don’t actually have to pay anything.
As for why to keep filing:
- renouncing your citizenship is difficult and expensive
- it’s hard to avoid the US
Let’s say you have no plans to ever live in the US again. Does that mean you never want to visit friends or family you left behind? Does that mean you’ll never go to a sporting event, concert or professional conference in the US ever again? If you’re flying internationally, will you always be willing to pay extra and do extra work to avoid being on a plane that makes a stopover in the US?
For most people it’s a few hours of work, and/or a hundred bucks or so once per year to keep their options open and avoid major headaches.
Thanks for the well laid out response. I learned a lot, and my assumption on renouncing citizenship were along the same lines as:
Yeah, it’s more: “Oh, you want to renounce? Guess we better audit your last 5 years of tax returns with a fine-toothed comb.” In addition, you have to do two separate interviews with US officials, plus pay a $2.5k USD fee. Plus, you might be hit with an exit tax if you have any wealth – and that includes retirees who are counting on using that wealth for their retirement.
It’s rather simple, they see you as sharing their same culture, so they consider you part of their tribe, while others appear to them as being too different, implying cultural friction and danger.
You aren’t a Turk?
that he would not consider me “an immigrant” because I’m from the west.
I’ve lived in 7 countries - and still living in a foreign country now - and I’ve heard the same thing from many locals in all the countries I’ve lived in.
It’s not because you’re from the West that you’d be an acceptable immigrant, it’s because you’re white. From the way you’re telling the same story I’ve heard a million times myself, I’m 99% certain you’re as white as I am.
Yep. When I visit my girlfriend’s family in Peru, I get looks because I’m mixed Caucasian (white skin but some asian features) and definitely not Latino. When I stayed in Germany, or visited Austria or Switzerland, I did not get the same looks or attitudes. I’ve been around, and I’ve found a lot of people’s initial attitudes towards you depends on how similar or different you are to them at face-value.
It depends on who.
For immigrants changing their mind, they are either going to approach it as moving back to their old country or being an immigrant in the new country.
For most native born Americans who I know who did or will, they will also likely self identify as immigrants.
It will be the elderly moving to Latin America to retire who will likely refer to themselves as “expats”.
Your associate is racist. You should tell them.
I grew up in the USA and live in Australia. I think of and refer to myself as both ‘expat’ and ‘immigrant’.
Which word I use depends on context. I’m an American expat (context: my relationship with USA), but I’m an immigrant in Australia (context: my relationship with Australia).
I guess I’m really just using “expat” to mean “emigrant”. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
US citizen who just finished immigrating to Japan 2 days ago. It took 8 months of planning and prep work, at least $50,000, and brought my wife and I to the edges of our sanity for the vast majority of those 8 months.
But we are finally free. Fuck ICE, fuck MAGA, and fuck Trump.
Now you’ve moved to Japan, with its rising far right politics
Eh, that’s mostly sensationalization by Western media.
According to my Japanese friends, the new government is quite moderate and their stances on a lot of issues are a lot more nuanced than the headlines imply.
She just supports “traditional gender roles”, is against same sex marriage, etc. y’know the usual bigot red flags
Still better than living in a country with an active fascist government.
I mean, at least Japan’s fascist government would likely be a functioning one.
Japan’s just lagging behind, they recently elected a reaganite/thatcherite to implement austerity policies. Fascism will soon follow, and they’re no stranger to it.
Give Japan time.
Wow! Incredible, well done
If I could realistically leave, I would. I suspect this is true or lotssss of people here who can’t just pick up and go
I’m about 2 lifetimes worth of labor short of having the money to leave.
At least you can be certain the Americans who are disgusted enough with their country to make the non-trivial effort of uprooting themselves are good folks, and they’ll be a net positive for whichever new society they choose to become part of.
That’s a very naive point of view. It’s incredibly difficult to move countries and takes either a stable overseas job or lots of money.
Interesting, one could also make this point for immigrants in/coming to America. Just wish more of us realized that before voting in 2024…even better in 2016.
True. Side effect is probably that the usa sinks faster with each good person leaving. Still it’s hard to blame them for leaving.
How else do we get to Idiocracy faster?
I’m doing my part!
the usa sinks faster with each good person leaving
They get what they voted for.
I’m so sick of reading this type of comment. Trump got 49.8% of the vote. That means Harris and 3rd party voters combined were a majority of voters. And so many people are disenfranchised here for BS reasons that I’m sure Trump would have lost if all the people who wanted to vote were able to.
I understand why foreigners would have a lot of hate for America, but please try to focus that hate on our elites, who set the rules for our sham democracy, propagandize the shit out of us via ownership of most of our media, and are responsible for our Imperialist crimes.
The average American gets virtually no say in what our government does to us or to the rest of the world.
try to focus that hate on our elites
“The Epstein Class”
63% of US population voted. Less than half of that group voted for Harris. That means at least 68.5% (but really more) either did not vote for Harris to mitigate the risk of Trump or actively choose to vote for him.
Fuck them all. 31.5% of the population is worth a shit. And even then some of them are anti-socialist libs… so I don’t even like all of them either.
Trump got 49.8% of the vote.
That in itself is an harrowing statistic.
“If you count third party candidates who have absolutely no hope of winning, it turns out that Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2024. Sure, more people voted for him than voted for the perfectly normal democratic candidate, but if you add her votes to the votes for the Green party candidate, the Libertarian Party candidate, the Socialism and Liberation party candidate, and RFK Jr. Combined, they all got very slightly more votes than Trump. So, America isn’t cooked.”
Agreed
Not to mention that these “elites” don’t respect borders, so properly identifying them as the issue and fixing it so they lose power/influence in your country, could have cascade effects, even in the originating country.
Because if you think America is isolated in our shitty politics, every other citizen from other countries are going to have a rude awakening when the technocrats/oligarchs have ruined or grow bored of the US and move on to ruin your country (see Venezuela, Palestine, or any country that signed a free trade agreement with us that are now getting hit with tariffs).
Their class solidarity is international, and so must ours be.
68% of registered voters voted for Trump.
I assume you’re counting the non votes as votes for Trump. Disingenuous at best.
It’s absolutely not disingenuous. It’s what happened.
Unless we’re criticizing third party voters, of course.
Yep, since that’s what they were.
Real quick. Quantify for me (since you seem to have a link for everything) how many of those people who didn’t vote but were eligible lived in places where their district was gerrymandered to hell? Or where they were the state had engineered it to be impossible to vote (limiting voting locations, making sure the lines would be astronomical and the weather would do the work for them), preventing people from bussing people to voting offices. Limiting or completely removing the ability to vote by mail. I’ll wait.
🦗🦗🦗🎶
Well…yes and no. If I recall well, little over 60% voted. Slightly more than half for trump. So a bit over 30% of the american voters voted for this shit. Those 40% that not voted… They could have made a difference but did not bother
I have
a friend… A person I know, who is dating a good friend of mine. He’s from California originally. He convinced my friend to not vote because Kamala had “bad policies” when she was an AG. Blah blah pot. Blah blah guns… blah blah excuse.Now he’s vocal about Trump’s policies, blah blah guns. Blah blah free speech, blah blah ICE.
I’m like mofo do you even hear yourself? She wasn’t perfect. She made mistakes… But nope couldn’t vote for the woman.
Shits infuriating.
It’s perfectly legitimate to vote third party in a non-swing state to express your disgust with the state of The Democrats. However, doing that in a swing state is basically just punching yourself in the face.
In no case should you choose not to vote because that registers as apathy rather than disgust with the choices.
So they both voted for Trump. There’s no debate. That’s what happened.
The 40% that didn’t vote would probably have also broke 50/50 for Trump vs. Harris if they’d bothered to vote. But, most of them probably live in states like Massachusetts or Wyoming where one party’s lead is so huge that their vote really wouldn’t have had any effect.
Stop deflecting and trying to blame non-voters when the real problem is the people who voted for Trump.
A lot of people wanted to vote but couldn’t because they were purged off of voter rolls.
Nope. Less than half voted for Trump. He didn’t even have a majority of people who cast a vote for president. And a third of the country isn’t eligible to vote due to age.
So just under 20% of Americans voted for him.
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Every abstained vote is a vote for trump, so 68% of the country voted for Trump.
Asinine reasoning. If Harris had won, they’d all have been a vote for her.
But they didn’t, and she didn’t, so they weren’t.
No, if literal Hitler is running in the election and you don’t vote, the vote counts for Hitler.
Trust me when I say I have wrestled with this for a long time now, having to live among people who either voted for the fascists or didn’t vote at all. There are a few key factors in the US that just don’t make it that simple:
- Our population is heavily propagandized to accept fascist behavior and rhetoric as normal, or even patriotic
- People in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods/cities struggle to see much of a difference between the parties because they are often living under full time military-style occupation by their local police force, even when their local government is run by Democrats. The tactics ICE is using against middle class white protestors are not new. They’re just new to middle class white people
- A lot of people with multiple kids and jobs, especially in states controlled by Republicans, are not reasonably able to vote because they don’t have the time and their state/local governments go out of their way to make it difficult
If you go from abstaining to voting for Trump, then you’ve voted twice!
They voted as a country. The country as an entity wanted Trump and it got him.
Only the losers in any election starts itemizing. I get it: Trump is about as legit as Hitler in terms of absolute percentage of people who voted for him vs. the entire pool of potential electors.
But that’s not how it works: he won as per the rules of the elections, and now he’s become the country’s choice and its problem.
Fitting username.
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To add: we’ve been voting on how our elections work since 2000. The problem was obvious then and we kept excusing candidates who support FPTP.
Yeah, there are lots of really awesome Americans out there.
Unfortunately there are some incredibly shitty ones who have managed to get control of everything.
There are also a lot of otherwise decent Americans who are propagandized beyond all reason. The machinery for manufacturing consent in this country is sophisticated and very well funded.
Not necessarily. There are Americans moving to Mexico and causing problems there.
Gentrification in Mexico City is a huge problem
Leaving the US is too expensive for most of us to even consider.
Lol wut.
it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to leave the country. meanwhile, many Americans couldn’t afford a 400$ surprise bill. I don’t blame people for leaving but the costs are usually upwards of 25k/person.
It does not cost thousands. It does cost a few hundred dollars.
Leaving usually requires downsizing to fit all your possessions inside a 70L pack. Most US Americans will have enough shit to pawn to afford that.
well that’s a fucking lie.
canada required 30k in savings and is the most accessible for most Americans.
go fuck yourself for talking shit about things you don’t know about honestly.
Now do going South.
It’s not a lie, it’s what I literally did. And many others did too.
Don’t assume every country in South America is Brazil or Mexico.
Trans people and poc face discrimination in pretty much every country in the world, Canada included. And also pretty much every country has at least once city where folks are more progressive than not.
I assure you that there are many places here in South America that are safer for you than the US right now.
Edit: if your trans you might have more options, being able to claim asylum. There is well documented evidence of state violence against queer folks in the US. See Canadian and HRC travel warnings.
https://ircc.canada.ca/english/information/fees/fees.asp#economic
Here are two sources directly from the Canadian government that show you are demonstrably wrong.
There are more fees and costs than this. But these are two examples.
It does cost thousands. Don’t minimize the difficulty of immigration. It’s not easy for anyone.
You’re going north. Now do south.
I’m not wrong. I did it during his first term.
Legally emigrating to a new country takes a lot of effort, but even doing it illegally (by buying a ticket and overstaying your tourist visa) would take at least a few thousand dollars, for the flight plus expenses for a few months while you find some income
There are loads of countries in South America where you can get a visa in a few months.
It cost me a couple hundred dollars. I didn’t even speak Spanish (at the time; I learned the language after I came), and I didn’t need to hire an immigration lawyer. People who pay thousands do it because they want a lawyer to do all the work for them.
Any then then after the next election you get deported to nigeria for being an illegal immigrant
Emmigrating ≠ being a digital nomad
There are literally countries with visas that are named “digital nomad visa” with a path to residency and then citizenship.
So, yeah, it sometimes is.
Citation needed
Citation is me, writing to you from South America.
I’m not going to dox myself, but I can assure you that there’s a lot of refugees from the US who have been coming for years.
Every country is different and the visa rules here in my country have changed several times since I came. But I recommend googling it. There are affordable options for you.
Anecdote makes poor evidence, but let’s roll.
Ok, we pick a South American country that’s dirt cheap and scrounge the cash to get there. And let’s say to hell with visas and assorted fees as a factor because a guy on the Internet told me that he did it almost a decade ago and it was totally cheap bro.
What language do they speak there? I’m not so arrogant as to assume Spanish, so I’m gonna need to learn that. I’ll have to rehome my cats cause I’ll bet getting them there with us isn’t likely. Quit my job, though that was always going to happen. Find a new job and hope that refugees can get and engineering job over a citizen because I’ve got fuck all in other skills and while not the fattest American around, my cardio game is weak and manual labor would be a transition. How’s the healthcare? Probably better than the US to be fair, but do they have my spouse’s medications, one of which will cause seizures if discontinued suddenly.
All that in addition to whatever it costs now. Please continue to tell me how easy it is.
If we could leave, we would leave.
And much of it is from university and stem. Whats funny is he is louding less border crossings but less border crossings is another indicator of a bad us economy.
Not really, only the top of STEM even has the opportunity to move. The universities of other nations simply don’t have the capacity to absorb the vast majority of American scientists. Building out that capacity would take a lot of time, and they’d end up with a lot of their own nationals in the field. America has only stolen so much international talent due to its failing primary education system paired with well funded university system.
students, post docs, and top of stem. so kinda top and bottom.
Well, that’s not consistent with my experience, but maybe you’re experiencing something different.
I hate it here and have tried to emigrate to Canada unsuccessfully. They changed their laws to be racist to Indian immigrants but they’ve basically just fucked up their ability to gain skilled workers.
You need to be rich and privileged to escape by normal means. The regime is making it harder every day. My deepest, most sincere hope is for the complete destruction of the USA federal government. They’ve ruined my life.
“Rich and privileged” is an overstatement. It is easier and cheaper to study in a good EU university than a US one, even for US citizens. Prospective students save money, and can stay after graduating.
For those for whom a study visa isn’t an option it is indeed somewhat more difficult, but as long as you have some skill that is in demand, it’s still far less difficult than Americans would imagine.
They changed their laws to be racist to Indian immigrants but they’ve basically just fucked up their ability to gain skilled workers.
Because Canada does not need more skilled workers. 1.35M indians live in Canada.
Ive lived in this country for my entire life (33 now) but I’m considering it as well. I’m a black American so it’s not like I’m exactly welcomed in most places but I have to try at this point…
If things don’t improve, I don’t see any other option. I don’t think a lot of Americans realize just how bad things are likely to get if there isn’t a pretty big change, very soon.
