Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

0:05Our colleagues Drew Hinshaw 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.

0:49We 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's always been a country of immigration, a land that people moved 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.

1:32to go live in foreign lands and work and retire and go to school there is rising. And it is rising really fast.

1:42And even more Americans want to leave. In 2008, Gallup found that one in 10 Americans wanted to move out of the U.S. Last year, it was one in five. 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.

2:21It just kind of blew my mind.

2:26Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 2nd.

2:38Coming up on the show, the American Exodus.

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3:27When Joe and Drew started looking into this question of Americans moving abroad, they found that there weren't any statistics that they could easily go and get. So here's what's really interesting. America, we conceive of our country as one of immigration to such a degree that our government doesn't keep statistics on the number of Americans who leave. In fact, if you go to the State Department and ask how many Americans live abroad, you get like this, I don't know, it's like the number's anywhere from 4 million to 9 million. It's all over the map. They basically had to piece it together for themselves, based on incomplete data from the U.S.

4:03government and elsewhere.

4:08One piece of data they did have is the number of deportations that have taken place under the Trump administration. Last year, the U.S. removed 675 ,000 non-citizens and many more foreign-born residents chose to leave. But hidden within that is another story which is perhaps more surprising and perhaps even has a longer historical impact. And that is that more Americans are choosing to leave of their own volition, natural born Americans. Drew and Joe found through their reporting that at least 180 ,000 Americans moved out of the U.S. last year. And they say that's likely a huge undercount. And so why are so many Americans leaving?

4:52People tend to read this politically. And you've got some commentators that have labeled this wave of American immigrants that, quote, Donald Dash, since the numbers have really just risen under President Trump's second term. But what we find is this is a phenomenon that's been building for years. Trump's re-election, like, yes, that was a factor for many, but for others not. And there's plenty of expats who voted for him. There's something, it's a deeper structural shift that's causing this. This shift started before the COVID pandemic, but it really exploded during that time. That's when remote work uncoupled where you could live from where you could work.

5:27And the numbers reflect that trend. So the number of Americans living in Portugal has jumped fivefold since the COVID pandemic. In 2024, it grew by 36 percent just that year. In the past 10 years, the number of Americans residing in Spain has doubled. The same in the Netherlands. It's more than doubled in the Czech Republic. And people say, oh, well, that's because we live in a time of immigration. People move wherever they want. It's not true the other way. Last year, more Americans moved to Germany than Germans moved to America. So this is a story of outflow, not inflow. But the prototype of Americans who used to move was, to be honest, a kind of profile of the well-credentialed, well-educated, professional worker who was perhaps posted overseas or maybe had made money and wanted to retire overseas.

6:12That profile has now been completely shattered, completely turned on its head. I always imagined the remote worker, a young kind of unattached person sitting on the beach on Bali behind a laptop, you know, raving at night. But we met a lot of people who have kids and are raising their kids over here who are doing relatively serious businesses, architects, engineers. And they're doing it from small towns in the Pyrenees and southern France, places like that. It's young families. It's younger people. It's not just people from the coasts. It's people from the Midwest and people from the south. You don't have to look very hard to find them.

6:52One thing enabling the surge? American wages. Even middle-class American salaries are high compared to most around the globe. And that's letting more people move abroad. Joe and Drew talked to dozens of people who've made the move. And Joe actually bumped into one of them at the supermarket. So I was doing the reporting for this piece, and there's an area of central Lisbon where there's an American supermarket. So I go into the supermarket and there was a guy there who was like handling this huge like jar of ranch dressing. So our son really likes ranch dressing. That's Michael LeBlanc. So I go in and I get the ranch.

7:34And while I'm in there, Joe approaches me. He introduced himself. He said he was a Wall Street Journal reporter and he was profiling expats. Like many other Americans that Joe and Drew talked to, Michael and his wife Stephanie started thinking about leaving the U.S. during the pandemic. COVID was a time of reflection and realigning our values and our life goals. We started having bigger conversations of how we wanted to live our lives and what we wanted our lives to look like post-COVID. The LeBlancs lived in Los Angeles, where Michael is from. Both had careers. Stephanie was working for the Kuwaiti Consulate in the cultural office, and Michael worked as a creative producer at a software company.

8:18But even with full-time jobs, between groceries, housing, and child care for their two young kids, their everyday expenses could be a burden. And on top of that, there was health care. 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.

8:54And 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 healthcare 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.

9:37We were really getting burnt out, I guess me specifically, with two young kids and working 50 hours a week and commuting, you know, an hour to and from work each day, dropping the kids off to daycare, preschool, elementary school, barely seeing them, being so exhausted on the weekends that we couldn't even be present and enjoy our family time. They began to feel like they needed to make a change. During COVID, when we were both working from home, we decided we needed a bigger house. And so we started driving around and looking at neighborhoods in L.A. And it became really complicated because of, you know, school districts and essentially all the places that we liked where there were good schools, we couldn't afford.

10:21So it was making the process really complicated. And so one day I said to Steph, I was like, OK, let's just go big. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? And ultimately, the LeBlancs landed on Portugal. How they made it happen, that's next.

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11:22Part of the reason some Americans are moving is because a number of countries are creating incentives to lure them in. More and more countries are finding ways to attract foreign workers with stable incomes. For example, Albania now lets U.S. citizens live there without paying taxes for a year. Spain and the Netherlands also have special breaks for digital nomads. In Mexico, Americans get an automatic six-month visa when crossing the border, which makes it easy to try out working remotely there. After considering their options, the LeBlancs decided on Portugal. They were initially drawn there by one of these easy visa programs.

12:02So then we researched Portugal, and then six months later, that December, is when we first went to Portugal. And so a combination of factors, the visa process being what it is, the weather is similar to California, and overall we liked it. In the end, the family decided to apply for a visa that's dependent on passive income. To qualify, they had to show the Portuguese government that they could support themselves, that their investment income equaled the local minimum wage. And for a family of four like theirs, that's around$27 ,000 a year.

12:40To do that, the LeBlancs bought two properties in the U.S. that they list on short-term rental sites. We bought one in Phoenix and one in San Antonio. I see. Interesting. And I want to mention to you that this was long-term. This was not something that we were able to do within six months or a year. It took us three or four years to do this. And so we had to make the decision because we really wanted to make Portugal work. So we really cut expenses and we lived off of Michael's salary and we used my salary to save and invest and buy these rental properties. And that's what allowed us to be able to make the move.

13:14While they were working towards their expat dream, the LeBlancs went through another experience that solidified their resolve. When my son entered public school in Los Angeles within two years, he had two active shooter lockdowns. After the first one, it was really unsettling. The second one, Steph, was really just beside herself. She was like, let's homeschool them. Let's get out of here. And at that time, we were thinking, do we pull him out? Do we homeschool him? I mean, this is not a realistic option for us because, meanwhile, we're both working 40, 50 hours a week, barely seeing our kids, dropping them off to school because we think this is, you know, the safest place for them.

13:54But not having that type of certainty. No one was hurt during those incidents. But worrying about their kids' safety put the LeBlancs even more firmly on a path to leaving the U.S. Our colleague Drew said this came up a lot when he talked to other American expats. I have to say, every single parent we spoke to, it wasn't like we weren't trying to pry or force people to say anything. We were very open-ended about this. They all brought up school shootings. They're all just like, really independently of us, you don't face the prospect of your child doing an active shooter drill. And they talked about how relieved they were.

14:33In 2025, nearly four years after they first thought of moving abroad, the LeBlancs started their new lives. They got an apartment in central Lisbon and enrolled their kids in a private school nearby, which cost about the same as their kids' after-school care in L.A. And they ditched those long commutes. Instead, they can walk their kids to school. Now there's so much built-in time to be with the family. Everything just feels a lot more relaxed. We get to spend a lot of time with the kids before school in the morning, pick them up at four in the afternoon, and actually go to the park and enjoy them as a family while the kids are still young.

15:12Stephanie, earlier you were talking about, you know, the changes that you made to your finances ahead of the move. When you run the numbers now, how do your expenses stack up compared to when you were living in L.A.? Our expenses have been cut in half. Nearly cut in half, I would say. Yeah. Healthcare was a big piece of it. For us, we don't have cars. We had two cars in LA. We just walk here and take the metro. Housing is less expensive for us here. Groceries are certainly less expensive. We're not paying for gas anymore. The other thing for us is college. The cost of sending our children into U.S.

15:50universities is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And here it's maybe a few thousand dollars a year. So that's a huge way that we're able to save money and not be contributing to college funds as much as we were aggressively. And then it lowers our retirement number significantly as well. 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.

16:36Part 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.

17:16is 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.

18:09So, you know, you have seen a backlash. In Ponta do Sol, 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.

18:28Still, 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. If you remember the singer Kalis, you know, my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. I haven't heard that song in a minute, but yes, I remember her. You sure you don't want to sing that?

19:02I'm going to spare our listeners having to hear me sing that. But wouldn't you know, she is now in Kenya. She's on Instagram. She's got like 3 million followers. And she makes these like quick videos about like the opportunities that she says are awaiting black Americans. I would say Kenyans are some of the friendliest and super helpful. Health care here is actually so good. It's really good and it's really affordable, which is amazing because I don't have insurance here.

19:31But while many Americans rave about moving abroad, the decision to do so has also prompted hard conversations with friends and family. Here's Michael LeBlanc again. You know, there's a distance and a lot of some family members and some friends of ours feel kind of like that we are either rejecting them or rejecting the U.S. And sometimes it's a nuanced conversation to say, you know, this is not we're not rejecting the American system. And I had a conversation with my sister yesterday and I asked her if she would ever consider moving over. And she said, no, she said, I think I'm more American than you are.

20:16I can't imagine living outside of the U.S. And I do feel very connected to California. But overall, you know, moving to another place where you can have a better quality of life, it's been a really easy transition. So now Lisbon feels like home.

20:42so joe drew you know we've been talking about americans who are leaving or want to leave and what that means for america's idea of itself i'm wondering if you both have any reflections on that given all the reporting you've done to me this challenges the idea that we have of ourselves as americans we understand our country to be one that people want to move to and of course that is still obviously true. But there's a subcurrent to that, which is this is a country that Americans are leaving. If you're someone who wants to walk home down a cobblestone street from work every day, you can do that.

21:16If you prefer to live in the suburbs behind a big car and drive through, you know, suburban Texas, you can do that. People have choices they didn't have once upon a time. Drew likes the cobblestone streets, I don't know if you noticed. But one other very big kind of takeaway from this reporting that I think came through when we were speaking to dozens of people who've moved not just to Europe, but to other places where a lot of Americans are going, Mexico, Southeast Asia, is that there are a lot more that want to do this. And there is now a pipeline of people that have made this move, how long they're able to last and whether this is some, you know, kind of historically very significant flow is yet to be determined.

21:57At the moment, It's just showing up in the data. And so the next few years will be decisive when we're trying to figure out whether this is one of those moments where perhaps the idea of America as a country of immigration starts to shift towards the idea of maybe something more nuanced.

22:27That's all for today, Tuesday, June 2nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.