By Thomas Dichter
Monday, May 04, 2026
Decades ago, becoming an expat was an unsettling
experience. To willingly leave behind one’s roots, one’s extended family, was
not easy, nor was it a choice many people made. The likes of Henry James (to
England), James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein (all
to Paris), Tina Turner (to Switzerland), and John Huston (to Ireland), did not
make the decision casually.
Though their reasons for leaving varied (getting away
from homophobia, racism, or taxes, and/or drawn to adventure or old-world
glamor), for all of them the move involved cutting oneself off from the
familiar, both in terms of time and space. If, say, you’d gone to live in Paris
before cheap and easy international phone service, you had to resign yourself
to communicating with the U.S. by letter, and until the 1950s, a trip back
“home” meant a five-to-seven-day transatlantic crossing by ship. And for all its
sophistication, Paris would have been an unfamiliar world, not just
linguistically and culturally, but even on an everyday level; what you’d been
used to eating and drinking in Chicago or Boston was unlikely to be found in
Paris.
But something new is afoot. There is quite recent
evidence of an expatriatism surge, enough of one to suggest that the decision
to live abroad might be much easier than it used to be. Leaving one’s country
no longer means cutting oneself off; you can be in Torino, Italy at 4 p.m. local
time and be in a Zoom meeting with colleagues in New York at 10 a.m. their
time. What defines “home” and one’s identity are becoming portable.
In March 2026, The Economist reported that “Westerners are fleeing their countries in
record numbers.” According to the Wall Street Journal, 2025 set a record for the number of Americans moving abroad.
Besides those who are moving away, many more are thinking about it. According
to a 2025 Harris poll, 42 percent of Americans are considering or planning on living abroad.
In addition, regular articles in the mainstream press of the “what it’s
like to live in …” ilk feed the curiosity of those contemplating the move. And
for those seeking practical advice, there are countless internet sites offering
tips on how to live as an expat, and/or ratings of countries where this is more
or less possible.
There are law firms specializing in helping expat wannabes get residence abroad
and deal with complex tax implications. According to CNN, there is now a “global rush for second passports.” And
significantly, it is not the elite, the wealthy, or the cosmopolitan class
fueling the movement. In November, the Wall Street Journal reported on one investment firm that was “fielding calls
from teachers, engineers, small-business owners and others who believe their
dollars stretch further abroad.” These new expats will add to the estimated 5.5 million Americans who already live abroad (a
number that is surely an undercount, because expatriatism now comes in a
variety of arrangements, including those people who are “partial” expats, e.g.,
eight months abroad, four months in the U.S., and many who move abroad and are
not easily traceable). Where are Americans now moving to? In addition to older
destinations like Mexico, Canada, and the U.K., we now see movement to New Zealand, and a few places in Europe that virtually
no one would have thought about until very recently, like Slovenia
and Albania.
If all this represents a major shift from what used to be
a fringe phenomenon toward a more common, if not yet mass, movement, in many
ways it makes sense. Today, communication technology, global trade, and modern
transport have practically eliminated most of the unsettling aspects of
expatriatism. In an earlier time, leaving your country of origin meant quite
literally being uprooted. If you were of working age, besides being distant
from family, you’d have to find a new job and most likely that would mean
becoming proficient in another language. Today, if you choose, you can uproot
yourself and remain rooted to where you started. Because of the internet, you
can take your job with you. The globalization of consumer goods has rendered
the unfamiliar almost distressingly familiar (M&Ms are everywhere, and you
can buy peanut butter in rural France).
Perhaps the most important difference between expats of
old and those of today is that most expats today are regular, ordinary folks.
The earlier expats were in many ways exceptional: people with the courage to
uproot themselves, people who were adventurous. To be sure, there are residual
traces of these characteristics in today’s expats, but by and large, moving
abroad permanently, or even for a few years, is more a matter of imagination
than anything else. And let’s recall, Americans have been a mobile people since
our beginnings, and even more so since the post-World War II rise of the middle
class (last year about 15 million Americans relocated domestically).
Among today’s expats there are many reasons for moving
abroad. A key factor for many is the rising cost of living in the U.S. There
may also be tipping points, like recent gun violence in one’s neighborhood, or
the second term of Donald Trump. For others the trigger is simply knowing
someone who has done it, or maybe a news story.
The small town in rural France near where I live six
months of the year is a case study in modern day expatriatism. Ten years ago,
there were few foreigners in the area. Perhaps in part due to the COVID years
when remote work became more common, and perhaps simply the result of a
cascading word-of-mouth (one person tells another and he or she tells another)
in the last six or seven years a tiny invasion has occurred. Now every Thursday
morning between 8:30 and noon, anyone who wants to speak English can drop in to
the main café in the center of this northern Burgundy town of 6,500 people. The
group can vary from five to 25 people, chatting away at a long table (outside
in the good weather, inside in the bad). Among the French regulars are a
retired physics teacher, a retired veterinarian, a farmer, a local store owner,
and a single mother of 35 or so, who worked as a bartender in Chicago years ago
and wants to keep up her English. But the core of the group are newly arrived
expats. There is a Russian political refugee, and a Dutch woman in her 70s who
spends a few months a year in the area. There are a dozen Brits, a half dozen
Americans, a New Zealander, and an Australian.
Our stories vary a lot. For one farming couple from the
north of England, their area was getting too crowded and too expensive. A
semi-retired British scientist married an artist from New Zealand and bought a
house and garden in the town five years ago. They wanted someplace that was not
overrun either by expats or tourists. For the Australian, an ex-foreign service
officer, living abroad was a long habit, and he and his partner were motivated
to move to the town in part because of housing costs (they bought an imposing
mansion with an enclosed garden in the center of town for about a fifth of what
a similar place in Australia would cost). For a divorced single American woman
from Idaho, who knew no French when she arrived, it was about a new life and
adventure; she rents an apartment in town for about $450 a month. A couple in
their late 50s have a house in Arizona and an apartment in our town; they both
work remotely and split the year in half, as my wife and I do. Two retired
physicians from the U.K. do the same. A couple consisting of a Wyoming woman
and a French pilot divide their time between New Zealand and France. To top it
off, there is a Scotsman who left Edinburgh 35 years ago, moved to Alexandria,
Egypt, to work as a translator, and later met an American woman living in
France. They now spend two-thirds of the year in France and the rest in Egypt.
None of these people is rich by any measure. In this part
of France, rents are low, and a 250-year-old stone house can be had for
$100,000 to $250,000. Real estate taxes are low, as is the cost of healthcare
and prescription drugs. High-speed fiber optic internet runs about $40 per
month. A meal in any one of the 15 restaurants in town will run from $35 to $55
a person (including tax and service).
What do we all talk about on Thursday morning? The
weather, family matters, the frustrations of getting the plumber to come when
you need him, etc. We also talk a lot about language. We are all at different
levels of proficiency—some of the French attendees are fluent in English, and
some of the Anglophones fluent in French, and so we talk about the many ways
there are to say things, and speculate on the cultural nuances of each.
What, then, do we share? Part of our common identity is
shared language, and the fact that we are expats. But otherwise, we embody a
portable identity: The Brits remain basically British; the Americans, American;
the Aussie is still an Aussie; all with a sprinkling of France thrown in. Except
for our living abroad, we are unexceptional.
What is new compared to the expatriatism of old is the
easy portability of identity, and along with it the ability to create a new
“familiarity.” The great enabler of this newly fluid state is of course modern
technology. Crossing the Atlantic in six to eight hours, plus the availability
of high-speed internet, makes it possible for an expat to keep up with family
and friends. You can even read your “hometown” newspaper online each morning.
While your body has moved, you can remain psychologically where you were
before, any time you choose. The growing use of VPNs is a graphic illustration
of this technological wonder—you push a button and the internet “thinks” you’re
in France; push it again and you are in the U.S. Portability indeed.
But perhaps equally important, the nature of home and our
consciousness about identity has changed.
In the book The Homeless Mind, sociologists Peter
Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner argue that people in a world
driven by technology and urbanization have developed a “componential” self,
such that our consciousness of who we are is something that we construct—we
live in a “plurality” of worlds:
In earlier societies … the
individual was always in the same “world.” Unless he physically left his own
society, he rarely, if ever, would have the feeling that a particular social
situation took him out of this common life-world. The typical situation of
individuals in a modern society is very different. Different sectors of their
everyday life relate them to vastly different and often severely discrepant
worlds of meaning and experience. Modern life is typically segmented to a very
high degree, and it is important to understand that this segmentation…has
important manifestations on the level of consciousness.
In other words, because so many of us no longer have the
solid common “life-world” that used to be provided by living one’s whole life
within a relatively isolated and clan-like setting, we have had to acquire the
ability to construct one in order to have a meaningful life. In short, we have
discovered that our identities can be created, and as such they can also be
portable. When we move to a new place, we create new spheres of familiarity. We
“make” new friends, we develop new routines, we decorate the house we’ve moved
into, and soon we have a new “life-world.”
Being an expat these days isn’t for everybody, but it is
infinitely easier than it used to be and, I think, much easier than it looks.
But what does this mean for the future? In the short term, it may mean very
little since right now we seem to be in a (I think temporary) retreat from
globalism, and of course most Americans still want to stay where they feel most
at “home,” in the U.S. But the growing number who want to leave their country
must mean more than just discontent or a seeking of adventure. Especially since
their identity seems to have become portable enough to carry much of their
Americanness with them, they become, however unwittingly, informal ambassadors.
Just as the little group of expats in my town in France spend part of their
time debating the nuances of English and French, and of our different cultures,
this mixing up of language and culture will inevitably make the American expats
a little less American and our French interlocutors a little less French; a
mirror, in a sense, of our own history as a melting pot. As such, expatriatism
may be yet another arrow in the quiver of a long-term (and worldwide)
multicultural trend.
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