Leaving America

Record numbers of US citizens are leaving America, or are seriously planning to relocate. In The Bitter Southerner, Lindsey Tramuta, an expat who has lived in France for 20 years, examines the structural failures that push people out: unaffordable housing, a broken healthcare system, eroding civil rights. Tramuta also explores the unsettling perspective on America that only distance can bring. “Some departures are driven by necessity,” she writes, “others by longing, ambition, or a sense of adventure.” All of them, however, raise the same question: Does leaving the US mean you’ve given up?

Around the same time, I started fielding more and more inquiries from Americans about visas to France and read stories of Americans giving up everything to leave. Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood, a novelist born in Vietnam who immigrated to the U.S. with her family, wrote about returning home to pursue the Vietnamese Dream and to be free of anti-Asian hate. The one-time Congressional-hopeful and anti-Trump resister Laura Moser left Houston for her grandfather’s former neighborhood in Berlin, the source of her Jewish family’s trauma. And I read about Dr. Judy Melinek, an esteemed forensic pathologist, who moved with her family from California to New Zealand during the pandemic to be part of a culture that respects and prioritizes science. In Paris, I befriended a photographer and former Marine who, like many Black Americans before him, saw the city as a refuge where he and his husband could create and build a future without fear.