Why more U.S. Citizens are leaving the country
If you've noticed more Americans talking about moving abroad lately, you're not imagining it. I've worked directly with hundreds of people in planning their moves overseas, and I've noticed five main reasons for why they want to leave the United States. Let's get started.
The number one reason that people tell me they want to leave the US is for quality of life. Now, what does that mean exactly? This can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but the way that I perceive it mostly from talking to so many people who are going abroad is that it's a combination of things. One big reason is just the feeling of the rat race in the US that people want to get away from. They just want to relax. They just want to enjoy their life. Sit outside at a cafe on a cobblestone street. People watch, just enjoy, just live. And it's hard to get that feeling of peace in the United States. There's always this like constant rushed energy that is very palpable no matter where you are. I'm sure there are some places that are more relaxed than others in the US.
But I think just lifestyle in general is a big piece. People want to, you know, just kind of get out of the hustle and bustle and go to a place where wherever you're walking around and looking around in a park, on the streets, you don't feel that rushed energy that you pretty much only feel in big cities and in the United States.
Another thing people talk to me a lot about is they don't want to have a car. They don't want to own a vehicle anymore. No surprises there really. I mean, cars are expensive, especially since the pandemic. They've gotten a lot more expensive. Gas is expensive. Insurance is expensive. I can afford to have a car, but I choose not to. And I live in a place where I don't have to have a car. I can just walk, take public transport, or ride my bike everywhere because it's just a hassle to have one. And whenever I do have a car in the US, I pretty much don't use it because I work from home.
So, I think once people are able to disconnect from their jobs and not have to commute to work, maybe they work remotely or they're getting retired, then they just don't want to have a car anymore and they want to live somewhere that's a little bit more pedestrian friendly. And there's not many walkable places in the US. The US has been definitely designed in a way that most people who live in the country need a car.
It's just crazy though to think that I was in my 20s before I ever used public transportation for the first time and it was in Hungary and I had to learn how to use the metro in Hungarian. And over the years of traveling to Europe, I got better and better at it. But it's interesting when you see little kids taking the metro by themselves with their friends to go to school. And to think that because I was born and raised in the US, any time I wanted to go somewhere, it had to be in the car with my parents until I got old enough to travel by myself and go abroad and get to use the public transport myself.
So, I think that's a big factor that people want to be able to get wherever they need to go in their local cities, but also to be able to take the public transport to go to other cities and other countries around places like Europe.
Food is another aspect that affects your quality of life. I mean, where do I start with this? The US food system, politicians will tell you it's the best in the world. It's not. We've got factory farming. We've got GMO crops. We have tasteless fruits and vegetables. And whenever people travel to other countries and they realize how much better the food tastes, then they come back here and they look around and they're like, well, you know, I don't want to eat this food for the rest of my life. I want to go back to where they went on that cruise to Mexico or that trip to Europe when they had amazing food.
And in Europe, you can get that. And you can get it quite affordably, especially if you're shopping at outdoor markets. I mean, everything tastes better when you leave the US food system, even broccoli.
Safety is also a huge piece of quality of life. Just being able to feel relaxed and like you and your family are safe and nothing's going to happen to you. I don't think I need to go into detail about the things that go on in the United States, but just to give you a little bit of a perspective compared to the other countries, the US rates number 128 out of 163 countries on the global peace index. So very far near the bottom. And the global peace index ranks countries on their peacefulness, militarization, safety, a lot of different dimensions.
So that just kind of gives you an idea of where the US is ranking when it comes to that feeling of peacefulness and safety and the reality of it. And a lot of people just want to get away from that for all different reasons. You know, people just want to be safe, their families, their kids especially. Like no one wants to get caught up in a shooting in the US, whether you're at a workplace, a school, a grocery store, a music conference, whatever. Police shootings as well. And this has become a normal part of everyday life.
I think we can all say that now with a lot of certainty. This is part of life in the United States that all of us as US citizens and residents have had to adapt to. I myself have personally been affected by it. My family's been affected by it. And that's not to say that it doesn't happen in other countries. I mean, I just witnessed a shooting in Ecuador, so it can happen in other places. But I think generally people are looking for places that are statistically safer where they can just have more peace of mind for themselves and their families.
The second biggest reason that people share with me when I ask them why they want to move abroad is politics. I don't want to take political sides here. I've been helping people move abroad for 20 years and it's been through all different political administrations on both sides of the aisle. The big difference this year is that it's been in the top two reasons that people want to move abroad rather than the fifth reason.
But it always is a reason because politics affects your quality of life. It affects your cost of living. It affects the economy. It affects jobs. It affects safety. It really unfortunately permeates every aspect of our life. So I don't want to make this just around one person or one administration because I think it's much bigger than that.
I think at the same time it's been a cumulative building up to the place that we find ourselves in right now in the US. And I don't think that people from any political party are necessarily happy about division in the US, the political rhetoric, the news coverage of everything. It's always controversy here. And so I think people are just tired of that.
And I think the general feeling that people have is that the US is going in the wrong direction for them. And so they just want to choose a different type of lifestyle elsewhere. Places, especially in Europe, places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, a lot of places feel a lot more stable politically and a lot more peaceful and that's really attractive to people.
So I think there is some correlation between people's political views and also the types of countries that they seek out, the types of government that those countries have, the types of social safety nets that those countries have. And so that's definitely related.
People also express to me that they want to feel safe, which is also related to quality of life. They want peace of mind. And we also work with a lot of people who feel personally threatened from the LGBTQ plus community. We have a lot of trans clients, people of all different races, genders, backgrounds.
And so what a lot of people tell me is that politics is not the number one reason that they want to move abroad. For some, it is. We did have people who left back in January, but they say that this is important that they've been moving towards the idea of living abroad for a while and this is just one more thing, one more reason for them to want to go abroad.
So, I think that's really important to want to go move towards something instead of always trying to get away from something. But we do legitimately have people who don't want to leave the US and feel like they have to for their own personal safety or for their own personal political views.
And we also have people that are not necessarily moving abroad but hire us because they want to have a plan B in place for if something happens in the future where they don't feel comfortable living in the US anymore. They want to have a backup plan for somewhere that they can physically go for themselves or their partner, for their families.
And so that's something that is really prevalent more than ever this year.
Related
