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.
More stories about expats
Eastern Promises
“In a Tokyo of tourists, the citizens have become strangers.”
“America Does Not Deserve Me.” Why Black People Are Leaving the United States
“The expats forging new lives in Puerto Viejo are part of a wider exodus of Black Americans from the U.S. in recent years, with many leaving for reasons that are explicitly political.”
The Great Lockhart Exodus
“For some, Lockhart is a nostalgia trip across a past that may not have ever really existed. For others, it’s just an opportunity to build something better.”
What It’s Like to Travel When You Have a ‘Bad’ Passport
“I am always an immigrant, never an expatriate. As an immigrant, to even visit a country, you must prove not just your legality, but your worth.”
The Ditch
“I might be a bilingual journalist, the holder of a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne, but navigating the world remained something he could do that I could not.”
The Unsettled
In Ubud, Indonesia, Jessa Crispin looks at the impact of next-generation expats — Western tech workers and “digital nomads” in search of carefully curated, long-term authenticity.
