BREAKING: Americans LEAVING The US in RECORD NUMBERS Under Trump
They’re calling it the Donald Dash.
For the better part of two centuries, the story of American migration ran in one direction: inward. The United States was the place people came to. Not the place people left.
That is no longer true.
In its 250th year, America, land of immigration, is 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.
They’re calling it the Donald Dash.
The Numbers
The U.S. experienced net negative migration in 2025, with an estimated loss of around 150,000 people, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution. 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.
The Trump administration has pointed to the broader migration collapse as proof its crackdowns are working. But buried in the numbers is something the White House isn’t talking about.
Beneath the stormy optics of the immigration crackdown 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. “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.”
They’re Not Coming Back
This isn’t a gap year. This isn’t a sabbatical.
The U.S. government has a months-long 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.
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.
One in five Americans. That is 66 million people.
Where They’re Going
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. 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.
In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language and not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine.
On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company, almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania, a former Stalinist state that now 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.
Who Is Leaving
The profile of the American emigrant has changed dramatically. This is no longer just young nomads and retirees.
Relocation agencies say their new clients 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. 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.
The new American emigrant includes a booming market of women. A Gallup poll last year found 40% of American women ages 15 to 44 would like to permanently move overseas if possible, a figure comparable to the 37% of sub-Saharan Africans who told the same pollster they wished to do the same.
“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 Education Pipeline Is Reversing
International students coming to America fell by 17% last fall and are expected to decline more quickly in years to come. Meanwhile, the cohort of Americans obtaining a degree in Europe has doubled from 2011, rising 14% last year alone in the U.K. More than 100,000 young students are now enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. 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. “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.”
What They’re Finding
Europe has eased visa rules and passed tax codes that let U.S. citizens experience the continent on American-style tax rates. In return, it offers inexpensive healthcare, walkable cities, affordable and safe schools, and housing that remains comparatively cheap and plentiful. 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.
In Barcelona, Lia Mashaka runs a business helping Americans navigate visas and find pediatricians. 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.”
Kelly McCoy, 45, moved to Albania in the summer of 2024 from Buffalo, N.Y., where she had been struggling to make ends meet on her $80,000 salary as an insurance analyst. After she was treated for a concussion and a broken arm at a local hospital, she wandered the halls confused about why nobody was trying to charge her. She has since relocated to Romania and now works as a consultant helping other Americans with 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.”
What It Means
“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, a researcher at Temple University who has spent years studying the trend. “Well, Americans move abroad and find they like life better abroad. They like the social democratic policies.”
In Trump’s rallies, he 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 living in the U.S.
The White House’s response to all of this? A spokesman said the U.S. economy is far outpacing other developed nations and the administration was attracting “countless ultra-high net worth foreigners” who are “shelling out $1 million for a Gold Card to come settle in the United States.”
Ordinary Americans are leaving in the largest numbers since the Great Depression. The administration’s answer is that rich foreigners are buying their way in.
That is the trade they’re bragging about.