This thinking may be, in large part, due to the constant barage of news articles asserting that everything in the U.S. is awful, intermixed with largely fake news reports about people who have moved to another country, where everything is wonderful: Over one-third of US adults would move to foreign country if able: poll
Reality check: At any given time, about 2.5-3% of Americans are living in another country. Many are abroad for school, for temporary work assignments, military or other functions – after which they will return to the U.S. Less than 1% of Americans will retire abroad. In reality, few Americans will move abroad.
Most of those featured in the “America is awful, so we moved to country X” stories had immigration privileges that most of us do not have, including people who already had dual citizenship, and a substantial number of the others with a “right of descent” ancestry in their destination country. Some countries provide residency, citizenship, or an enhanced path to residency or citizenship, if you had ancestors originally from certain countries.
If you don’t have that immigration privilege, moving abroad permanently is going to be very difficult.
The path to immigration is usually limited to:
- Study abroad programs (in some cases, can lead to a work visa, if you graduate from an abroad university)
- Work visas granted to those with select “in demand” skills
- Work visa granted to an internal company transfer from one country to another
- Marriage – by itself, marriage does not guarantee a visa but can smooth the process
- Residency via ancestry (but only if you are born into the right family history)
- Residency via investment (for the wealthy)
- A few exceptions, such as the DART treaty between the Netherlands and the U.S.
For everyone else, except for perhaps 20 countries that have easier paths for U.S. retirees (mostly in the Caribbean, Central or South America), moving abroad and getting residency visas is not easy to do.
More information here: Revealed: Why Americans Want to Leave the US (preply.com) – says a ton of Gen wants and expects to move abroad. Sorry for their disappointment when most find out that cannot easily pack up and move abroad – particularly with all the misinformation presented by the media that doing this is so easy …. not