Leaving America
American expatriation, repping any lifestyle but normal, and more in this week's digest.
Canon Press is releasing a new book of essays by a variety of writers engaging with my own book Life in the Negative World. The new volume is called Welcome to the Negative World, and is now available for pre-order. I have an essay in it responding to what the others had to say.
Leaving America
I’ve noted many times that one indicator to watch to see if America is really in trouble is expatriation. If we ever start to see a significant number of native born Americans leaving the country, that would be a warning signal not to ignore.
To date, most of what I’ve read on this suggests expatriation on only a small scale, often for what seem like (likely temporary) lifestyle reasons. For example, there’s been articles talking about the growing number of Americans that have moved to Mexico City.
But a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests the volume has been picking up, saying that Americans are leaving the US in record numbers (gift link).
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…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.
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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.”
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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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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.
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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.
Click over to read the whole thing.
We shouldn’t read too much into this. As the article notes, there isn’t necessarily good data available. Also, many of these Americans may be immigrants or their children returning to their homeland. The growth in foreign passports is part of a general trend of people looking to collect multiple passports. Americans are richer now, so more of them can afford to live the expat life. Life in a lower cost country has appealed for a while to some retirees, and we have a lot of Boomer retirees right now. There are only about 100,000 annual moves by Americans to OECD (developed) countries.
Still, we’d do well to pay attention. The online zeitgeist has a lot of narratives about the desirability of leaving the country (e.g., “passport bros”).
One country that’s had a lot of out-migration is New Zealand. This just made a round of headlines as the country’s former prime minister just moved to Australia. Moving away is a longstanding trend for this small island country, but levels seem to be climing. The Financial Times recently ran a story on this. 200,000 people have left the country in the last three years, a big chunk to Australia. With 670,000 New Zealanders living there, that’s 12% of the entire population that’s moved to Australia alone. To put that in perspective, the official total foreign born population share of the US is 16%.
The country’s weak economy and high costs are cited as factors. But Australia isn’t exactly cheap. And New Zealand has been a poster child for “YIMBY” policies, as making it easier to build homes there was supposed to have brought housing costs down. Yet the exodus has accelerated.
The FT notes that New Zealand’s population is still growing due to in-migration by foreigners from places like Fiji, India and the Philippines. Undoubtedly these population shifts are going to change the skill structure of the economy, and maybe in ways that actually structurally reduce its economic potential, depending on the mix and education/skill structure of the newcomers.
Any Lifestyle You Want, As Long as It’s Not Normal
I always like to say that the media love to rep every lifestyle choice except normal. Of course, these pieces also tend to be good for clicks. New York magazine is one of the publications that has figured that out, and had a number of recent pieces that went viral online.
One was about women who regret having children. It’s profiles of a handful of women talking about how they wished they hadn’t had kids. Here’s one sample:
It’s been a year. Genuinely, if there is a hell, I’ve been living in it since I gave birth. My son has a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair. I’ve tried so hard to do the things early intervention advised us to: I read the books, play the music, dance around, and nothing works. Every day, things get worse and worse. I wake up and count down the hours until my husband comes home. At some point, I thought, I can’t keep living like this, and neither can my son.
I noticed that every one of the mothers featured here were married when they had a baby. But if you want to be a single mother by choice, New York is happy to tell you all about it and how to find support. A sample:
Kelly always loved kids. Growing up in a rural part of Texas in a conservative, Christian environment, she worked as the camp counselor during vacation Bible school and volunteered to teach classes at her church. She knew she’d be a mother one day, she just had no idea how she would get there — especially once she understood she was queer. When, at 28, she eventually married a trans man, they got as far as making embryos together, but those embryos are set to be destroyed once their divorce is finalized this spring. Now living in Houston and working for an education nonprofit, she pondered how she might pursue her goal on her own. Kelly doesn’t use much social media, but she does use Reddit. About a year ago, she stumbled on a sub-Reddit dedicated to becoming a solo mother by choice and began poring over other would-be parents’ stories.
And if you want polyamory, they are happy tell you about the possibilities in their recent piece “Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load? For some moms, non-monogamy is a way to reclaim more than just their sex drive.”
These days, it’s no longer shocking to hear parents negotiate who will handle homework and bedtime while the other meets a crush for drinks. Even momfluencers in Utah are posting about their throuples. The most obvious perk of an open marriage is getting to hook up with other people. But the more poly parents I meet, the more I hear ENM framed as a co-parenting hack. These moms aren’t venting about being stuck at home with the kids while their husbands woo other women. They don’t seem to be stuck keeping score of who handles the grocery shopping and takes the most days off when the kids are sick. And they don’t feel guilty about taking time for themselves. For these moms, non-monogamy seems to offer more than just a way to reclaim their libido. Could it also be the secret to raising kids without completely resenting one’s husband?
Of course, like every article about polyamory, they are forced to admit that it appears to come with problems in many cases.
Best of the Web
RIP: John Perkins - Perkins was a civil rights leader who was a pioneer in the evangelical racial reconciliation movement. I didn’t learn about him until 2014 when someone suggested I attend the Christian Community Development Association conference. I heard him talk there and was blown away by it. He was a very impressive man. And while I think it’s fair to say the CCDA approach never achieved what Perkins hoped it would, I respect it a lot as an attempt at a genuinely Christian attempt to address racial disparities and divides.
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: The Post-Christian Condition - More sentiment, more spectacle, more fillers, and more AI slop
Patrick Brown: Marriage Got Better—So Why Is It Disappearing? This article isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Brown treats falling marriage rates as a matter of male deficiency, such as working class men not measuring up to the expectation of women. But it fails to mention female deficiencies. A significant share of working class women are themselves not viable marriage prospects to the kinds of men they would want to marry. How many men who have themselves put together are looking to marry a “dinergoth”?
McKinsey: At 250, sustaining America’s competitive edge - An interesting, readable report about the economic future of America. Not at negative as many takes, while acknowledging that there’s much work to be done.
Vanity Fair: The Founder of Anthropic Says He Wants to Protect Humanity From AI. Just Don’t Ask How.
New Content and Media Mentions
Someone wrote a letter to the editor about my recent Washington Post op-ed. I also got a mention in Touchstone magazine.
New this week:
The Garden, the Tower, the Temple and the City - Leadership in a change of age - a guest essay by John Seel
My podcast this week was with T. C. Schmidt on his Josephus scholarship.
This month’s Member (more info) only podcast is about the Christian nationalist vision for America as expressed by its proponents.
Cover image: Jacinda Ardern by WEF, CC BY 2.0