Americans appear to be leaving the U.S. at once-in-a-century levels, fleeing divisive politics and a cost of living crisis.
In 2025, the flow of Americans ditching the 50 states for good caused the first estimated net outward migration of the U.S. population in decades, something that likely hasn’t happened since the 1929 Great Depression.
“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,” Jen Barnett, founder of the resettlement consultancy firm Expatsi, told The Wall Street Journal. “Now they’re ordinary people, like me.”
In 2024, Barnett joined in the trend, relocating to Yucatán, Mexico.
The U.S. government doesn’t officially track the number of Americans who’ve resettled abroad, so estimates of just how many people left can vary.
In 2025, net outward migration was between negative 10,000 and negative 295,000 people, Brookings estimates, forecasting a similar negative trend for 2026.
Others have pegged the outflow at around 150,000 people in 2025.
Before 2009, a typical year saw 200 to 400 people renounce their citizenship. By 2025, that figure was nearing 5,000, with more renunciations expected this year because fees to do so have dropped steeply.
Nearly all of the European Union’s 27 member states have seen record levels of Americans arriving to live and work there in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
Outside of Europe, Mexico is another popular destination.
Approximately 1.6 million Americans live there, the State Department estimates, the largest overall concentration of American expats in the world.
Even more people are considering making the change.
A November 2025 Gallup poll found that one in five Americans would like to permanently move, double the figure from ten years earlier.
A variety of factors are driving the trend, according to the data, including political disagreements and affordability issues. Further, “golden visas” for foreign investors, remote work, and incentives for digital nomads all have opened new pathways for leaving the U.S.
“For the better part of two centuries, the story of American migration ran in a single direction: inward,” Global Citizen Solutions, a citizenship advisory firm, wrote in a recent report on the trend. “The United States was the gravitational center of global human movement, the place people came to, not the place people left. That narrative is shifting.”
According to a February 2025 Harris poll, 68 percent of Americans considering leaving the U.S. cited unattainable home ownership and a sense they were “merely surviving instead of thriving.”
Meanwhile, 49 percent cited high living expenses and disagreements with the political situation in the U.S.
Within the U.S., another migration is underway, as high-cost states like California and Hawaii have lost population in recent years.
