Emigration from the United States


Emigration from the United States is a complex demographic process where individuals born in the United States move to live in other countries. The process is the reverse of the immigration to the United States. The United States does not keep track of emigration, and counts of Americans abroad are thus only available courtesy of statistics kept by the destination countries.

Reasons

According to a Gallup poll from January 2019, 40 percent of women under the age of 30 would like to leave the United States.

Net effect

The United States is a net immigration country, meaning more people are arriving to the U.S. than leaving it. There is a scarcity of official records in this domain. Given the high dynamics of the emigration-prone groups, emigration from the United States remains indiscernible from temporary country leave.

Statistics

As of June 2016, the State department's consular section estimated that there are 9 million non-military U.S. citizens living abroad, an increase from the 4 million estimated in 1999. However, these numbers are often disputed as being underestimated.
One reasonably "hard" indicator of the US citizens' population overseas is offered by the fact that often when they have a child born to them abroad, they obtain a Consular Report of Birth Abroad from a US consulate as a proof of the child's U.S. citizenship. The Bureau of Consular Affairs reports issuing 503,585 such documents over the decade 2000–2009. Based on this, and on some assumptions about the family composition and birth rates, some authors estimate the US civilian population overseas as between 3.6 and 4.3 million.
Sizes of certain subsets of US citizens living abroad can be estimated based on statistics published by the Internal Revenue Service. US citizens are generally liable for US income tax even if they reside overseas; however, if they receive earned income while residing in a foreign country, they can exclude an amount of foreign earned income from the US taxation or receive credit for foreign taxes paid. The IRS reported that almost 335,000 tax returns with such a foreign-earned income exclusion form were received in 2006. This imposes a lower bound on the number of US citizens who were living and working in foreign countries at the time.
In the same tax year, almost 969,000 US taxpayers reported having paid foreign tax on "general limitation income" from foreign sources on their foreign tax credit forms. Of course, not all of these were actually residing abroad full-time.

Citizenship

Americans can only lose their citizenship in a very limited number of ways, and anyone born to at least one American parent, or born on American soil, is considered to be an American citizen. It is not automatic for a child born abroad to one American parent to obtain US citizenship if the American parent has been living abroad for a long time.
Few Americans living abroad renounce their citizenship, with the long-term trend being in the low-hundreds per year; this changed, however, after the United States government passed Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, requiring foreign banks to report information on American depositholders with bank accounts located outside of USA. Almost 3,000 Americans renounced their citizenship in 2013 alone, many citing the new disclosure laws and difficulty in finding banks willing to engage in said reporting.

US citizens living abroad

The list below is of the main countries hosting American populations. Those shown first with exact counts are enumerations of Americans who have immigrated to those countries and are legally resident there, does not include those who were born there to one or two American parents, does not necessarily include those born in the US to parents temporarily in the US and moved with parents by right of citizenship rather than immigration, and does not necessarily include temporary expatriates. In all other cases, starting with Israel, the figures are estimates of part-time US resident Americans and expatriates alike.
  1. – 899,311 United States-born residents of Mexico
  2. – 800,000
  3. – 738,203
  4. – 700,000 according to a press release from the White House on 12/06/2017
  5. – 600,000
  6. – 260,000
  7. Israel – 185,000
  8. – 170,000 to 200,000
  9. – 158,000
  10. – 140,222
  11. – 107,755
  12. – 100,619
  13. – 90,100
  14. – 88,000
  15. – 82,000
  16. – 71,493
  17. – 63,362
  18. – 60,000
  19. – 60,000
  20. – 52,486
  21. – 40,000
  22. – 38,000
  23. – 36,000
  24. – 36,000
  25. – 32,000
  26. – 31,000 to 60,000
  27. – 25,000
  28. – 25,000
  29. – 20,769
  30. – 17,748
  31. – 16,555
  32. – 15,000
  33. – 15,000
  34. – 15,000
  35. – 12,475
  36. – 10,552
  37. — 10,409
  38. – 10,000
  39. – 9,634
  40. – 9,510
  41. – 9,128 to 50,000
  42. – 8,013
  43. – 8,000
  44. – 7,500
  45. – 5,417
  46. – 3,000
  47. – 2,228
  48. – at least 2,008 up to 6,200