The number seeking to escape violence and political strife in the United States is small but growing
you is your liberty,” says Count Valentin de Bellegarde to Christopher Newman, the protagonist of Henry James’s novel. Rich, self-made and free of class prejudice, Newman moves to Paris for fun, only to be sucked into the intrigues of the French aristocracy. The template still describes one type of American expat: the well-off innocent who comes to Europe for amusement or edification. Another sort, however, comes not to enjoy the old world but to escape the new one.
It is hardly surprising that conservatives are less likely to say they want to leave their country. And the follow-through rate remains tiny: a few tens of thousands of émigrés out of a population of 330m. But many recent expats say they left partly out of despair at where the United States is heading.
Some émigrés are drawn to Europe’s robust social safety nets. Heather Caldwell Urquhart, a writer who moved to Lisbon in 2021, had taken a clerical job in Massachusetts simply to get health insurance. In Portugal she and her family pay for coverage a fraction of what an equivalent American plan would cost. “We didn’t realise how shredded the United States’ social fabric was until we got here,” she says.
Other factors are more prosaic. The huge increase in remote working during the pandemic made living abroad more feasible. And the European countries that lure the most Americans have set up tempting deals for foreigners. The Netherlands lets companies exempt 30% of skilled foreign workers’ income from taxes. In Portugal a residential visa requires income of just 150% of the national minimum wage, or about €1,100 per month–an easy hurdle for American retirees.
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