Americans are leaving the US at rates not seen since the Great Depression — and 5,000 even gave up citizenship last year

As a cost of living crisis continues to burden people across the country, Americans are reportedly fleeing the U.S. at a rate we haven’t seen in nearly a century.

An estimated 150,000 people fled the country in 2025, leading to a negative net migration in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal, which notes that such a thing hasn’t happened in America since the Great Depression in 1929 (1).

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According to the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank, this outflow of Americans is likely to increase in 2026, though these numbers can be tough to track since official U.S. data doesn’t completely capture the number of Americans leaving the country.

The Trump administration likely considers this to be a win, since more people moving out than moving in could be framed as proof that the president has delivered on his promise to restrict new visas and ramp up deportations. But a hidden detail appears to be lying beneath the optics of what some might consider effective immigration policy: regular Americans are fleeing in record numbers.

“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed. Now they’re ordinary people, like me,” Jen Barnett, founder of the resettlement consultancy firm Expatsi, told the WSJ (1). Barnett herself joined the exodus in 2024 when she relocated to Yucatan, Mexico.

‘Merely surviving instead of thriving’

While U.S. government data doesn’t track the number of outbound Americans, Brookings estimates that net outward migration in 2025 fell somewhere between negative 10,000 and negative 295,000 people (2).

This estimation shows that many Americans prefer to live elsewhere, but the number of those who renounced their citizenship in 2025 suggests many who left aren’t planning on coming back. Approximately 200 to 400 Americans would renounce their citizenship in any given year before 2009, but that number jumped to almost 5,000 in 2025, with more renunciations expected in 2026.

Furthermore, a Gallup poll from November 2025 found that 20% of Americans (one in five) have expressed a desire to move out of the U.S. permanently, a figure that has doubled since 2015 (3).

According to the data, affordability issues and divisive politics are two of the main factors that are driving this outward trend, though the ability for many to work remotely has opened new doors for those looking to leave the states. A 2025 survey from The Harris Poll also found that nearly 70% of those considering a move out of the U.S. believe homeownership in America is unattainable (4), adding that living stateside feels like “merely surviving instead of thriving.”

“For the better part of two centuries, the story of American migration ran in a single direction: inward,” states Global Citizen Solutions in a recent report on its website (5). “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.”

Read More: Here’s the average income of Americans by age in 2026. Are you falling behind?

Where fleeing Americans are going

As the WSJ reports, nearly all of the 27 countries that make up the European Union have welcomed record levels of American expats in recent years (1).

These countries have been actively working to recruit Americans by easing visa rules and enacting tax codes that allow U.S. citizens to pay the tax rates they’d typically pay at home.

“I wasn’t expecting to be surrounded by this many Americans,” Michael Le Blanc, a 56-year-old American expat who now freelances from Portugal, told the WSJ.

Lia Mashaka, who runs a business that brings Americans to Barcelona and helps them with the move, says many American expats arrive with the intention of only spending a year or so in Spain. But as Mashaka shared with the WSJ, “I’ve never had a client that has chosen to go back to the U.S.”

Aside from Europe, Mexico is also a popular destination for U.S. citizens who seek an escape from American life. According to estimates from the State Department, roughly 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, making the country home to the largest concentration of U.S. expats in the world.

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Article Sources

We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.

The Wall Street Journal (1); The Independent (2); Gallup (3); Yahoo Finance (4); Global Citizen Solutions (5)

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Americans are leaving the US at rates not seen since the Great Depression — and 5,000 even gave up citizenship last year

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