The media is hyping the latest Gallup survey in which 40% of young women, mostly liberals, want to permanently leave.
In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.
Since Gallup began measuring this question globally in 2007, few countries have shown gender gaps this wide in the desire to migrate. Before the U.S. in 2025, no country had recorded a gap of 20 points or more between younger men and women.
Rising interest in leaving the U.S. is shaped not only by age and gender but also by political attitudes. In 2025, there is a 25-point gap in the desire to migrate between Americans who approve and those who disapprove of the country’s leadership.
What has not changed is where these younger women would like to go. Canada remains the top preferred destination for younger American women looking to leave, with 11% of those in the years since 2022 mentioning Canada as their top destination, ahead of New Zealand, Italy and Japan (all 5%).
Sure, move to Canada, good luck affording a house there, eh. And good luck moving to Japan. New Zealand’s economy is dependent on sheep and Lord of the Rings tourism. Italy is being rapidly depopulated and moving there seems more like a Diane Lane romance movie fantasy than an actual plan.
Not that anyone is actually doing this.
After a decade of massive interest in leaving, you’d think America would have a huge exodus and gender gap. There isn’t.
About 5,000 Americans have formally left the country in one year.
An estimated 1,285 U.S. citizens expatriated in the first quarter of 2025, marking a 102% increase compared with the last quarter of 2024, according to a report from CS Global Partners, which analyzed statistics from the U.S. Federal Register. Should this pattern continue, 2025 is poised to see a record-high number of Americans relocating overseas, surpassing the previous peak in 2020 — during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
5,000 is a slow day for JFK Airport.
Around 10,000 Americans get residency in Canada every year.
There are between 5-8 million American citizens living abroad, most of these however are working or studying abroad, or are immigrants to this country who move back and forth between their home country.
Mexico is currently the top-ranked country for ‘American expats’ with around 800,000, and while some Americans move to Mexico for the lower cost of living, the vast majority are Mexicans who got US citizenship because it’s convenient.
They’re not Americans.
There are about a quarter million in the UK, 150,000 in Germany (mostly there for work or education), and 62,000 in Japan (ditto.) The 120,000 in China and Bangladesh and other third world countries are probably like the Mexicans.
Few of these people have permanently left America.
The remigration numbers are significant because some countries (unlike America) are single citizenship countries which means anyone seeking to be a citizen has to formally renounce their US citizenship.
Finally, there’s no significant gender gap with men in some cases outnumbering women.
So for all the talk about leaving America, they’re not actually leaving. To quote the Pirates of Penzane, “Yes, but you don’t go.”
