Says 5% of Americans are planning to move abroad in the nest few years and 2% have already begun the process.
40% say they would like to live abroad: Fed up: 2 in 5 Americans say living in U.S. no longer enjoyable
More here: More Americans want to leave the country due to cost of living – Fast Company
The media does a fantastic job bashing the U.S. and convincing younger people, everything is awful, but idyllic everywhere else. It is the entire focus of Business Insider (see my series linked in the right column of this blog).
This dream is going to turn out to be fiction when these people meet reality. Almost none of them will be moving.
Reminder
At any point in time, an estimated 2-3% of Americans are living abroad, including those on temporary work, study abroad, or military assignments. About 0.7-1.3% of Americans retire abroad and half those had prior dual citizenship, family or close ancestry living abroad – or they were already living abroad and had made their career there (typically Canada and Mexico, which account for about 38% of Americans living abroad).
From my survey of 300 stories of people moving abroad, about 1/3 are attractive, young, educated females who marry a foreigner to obtain a long term residency visa; about 1/3 are people who already had pre-existing dual citizenship, or are children of immigrants and eligible for residency or citizenship in their parents’ country, or have a right-of-descent ancestry in certain countries.
Unless you are young and plan to marry a foreigner, or young and have the right in demand job skills, or you have pre-existing immigration privilege, you are very unlikely to move abroad.
Most people don’t know that and actually believe the romance stories published by CNN and Business Insider. They do not see the hypocrisy of (see my series) having grown up in a country that gave them great wealth to attend expensive private universities, do studies abroad, spending $250,000 to $400,000 on university educations to study not-in-demand fields paying $52,000 per year.
This big migration won’t happen because most people do not have the right immigration privileges.