At least 180,000 Americans packed up and left the country voluntarily in 2025, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 15 countries. They are, by every measure researchers can find, exactly the kinds of people a democracy cannot afford to lose. And they are not coming back.
The Numbers Are Bad, and They're Getting Worse
The Wall Street Journal combed through full and partial 2025 data from 15 countries and landed on a floor, not a ceiling, of 180,000 voluntary American emigrants last year. Floor, because most countries haven't finished releasing their full figures yet. The real number is almost certainly higher.
Americans arriving in European Union member states are at a record high and climbing. Ireland alone saw American arrivals double over the past year. The Guardian reports that Gallup polling now shows roughly one in five Americans say they would permanently leave if they had the chance, a rate comparable to traditional emigration-heavy countries like Guatemala and Mexico. Let that comparison sit with you for a moment.
And that's just the people who left by choice. The Department of Homeland Security reported 675,000 deportations in 2025, alongside 2.2 million so-called 'self-deportations,' a number that almost certainly includes U.S. citizens leaving alongside undocumented family members. According to a Mexican government survey cited by the U.S. Census Bureau, 50,000 U.S.-born Mexican Americans moved south across the border last year. South. Across. The border. Into Mexico.
Meet the 'Democratic Drain'
George Mason University professor Justin Gest has been studying migration patterns across 149 countries, and what he found writing in The Guardian should make anyone who cares about self-governance deeply uncomfortable. Prospective emigrants, even those who aren't politically active, consistently show stronger support for democratic institutions and liberal norms than the people they leave behind. Every time someone leaves, the country's civic immune system gets a little weaker.
Gest calls it a 'democratic drain,' a cousin to the well-documented 'brain drain' that economists have studied for decades. Except instead of just losing economic productivity, the United States is losing the people most likely to vote, organize, protest, run for school board, and generally do the grinding unglamorous work that keeps democratic systems from rotting out. The people who care most are the people most motivated to go somewhere that feels like it still functions.
Some people are calling the voluntary liberal exodus the 'Donald Dash,' which is darkly funny until you think about what it actually means for the electoral maps being redrawn right now in Florida and Texas, where some new districts will be decided by a few thousand voters. A few thousand. The math is not abstract.
Who's Leaving, Specifically
Young women, for one. According to Gallup data cited by The Guardian, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they could. That is twice the rate of men their age, and four times the rate from 2014. Gest connects this directly to the Trump administration's rollback of reproductive rights and its retreat from non-discrimination enforcement. When a government makes clear that your bodily autonomy is negotiable, some percentage of people capable of leaving will leave. Turns out that percentage is large and growing.
The wealthy are going too. UBS, the international wealth management firm, reported that 31 of its 87 billionaire clients had already relocated at least once in 2025. Demand for pricey consulting services that help Americans secure foreign residency or citizenship has surged. At least half the world's countries now offer fast-track citizenship or residency visas in exchange for investment or cash, and Americans are using them.
And scientists. After the Trump administration's early research funding cuts, American scientists submitted 32% more job applications to foreign institutions in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period the year before. A group of scholars who specifically study authoritarianism relocated publicly, convinced the U.S. was in democratic decline. Critics called it self-serving. Gest's analysis suggests it is self-defeating, because nothing accelerates democratic erosion faster than losing the people most committed to resisting it.
The Population Math Is Getting Ugly
Here's a number that deserves more attention than it's getting. Net international migration, the difference between people entering the U.S. and people leaving it, peaked at 2.7 million in 2024. It dropped to 1.3 million in 2025. The Brookings Institution believes the United States may already be experiencing net population loss for the first time in 50 years.
Fifty years. The last time the U.S. had net population loss, Nixon was president and Watergate hadn't happened yet. That is the scale of what is quietly occurring right now, driven simultaneously by a crackdown on immigration and an outflow of people who no longer feel like the country has a future worth staying for.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are already pursuing foreign citizenship as a backup plan. Applications for Irish and British citizenship through ancestry surged last year. The New Yorker, bless its heart, published an actual narrative guide to obtaining foreign citizenship. When The New Yorker is running emigration how-tos, something has shifted in a way that is not easily reversed.
The Dingo Take
Here is what makes this particular story so maddening. The people engineering the authoritarian consolidation, the gerrymandering, the federal funding cuts, the deportation machine, the rollback of rights, they are, whether by design or by dumb luck, also engineering the conditions that drive away the exact citizens most likely to stop them. It is a self-reinforcing loop. Make the country hostile to democracy's defenders, watch democracy's defenders leave, use their absence to further consolidate power. Repeat until the opposition is thin enough to manage.
Gest is careful to say this is not about shaming people who leave for jobs or family or safety. Migration is personal, and people's reasons are their own. But the aggregate effect of 180,000 voluntary departures, millions of forced ones, and a Gallup poll showing one in five Americans daydreaming about somewhere else is a political landscape that tilts harder right with every person who decides their energy is better spent somewhere that will actually let them use it. The districts being redrawn in Texas and Florida will feel every single one of those missing voters.
The Trump administration has been remarkably effective at making America feel small, hostile, and exhausting, particularly for young people, women, scientists, immigrants, and anyone who takes democratic norms seriously. The cruelest part is that it works. The crackdown generates the exodus, and the exodus makes the crackdown easier to sustain. If you've been wondering why some of the most capable, engaged people you know are talking about Portugal or Ireland or Canada, this is why. And no, the answer is not to shame them for considering it.
