Emigration from the United States

Emigration from the United States is a complex demographic phenomenon existing for decades and having a number of reasons. The process is the reverse of the immigration to the United States.

For the first centuries of its existence, the US benefited from population attracted large masses of immigrants, and it continues to be a net immigration country. ^{[citation needed]}

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

Economic reasons (e.g. inexpensive housing in Mexico^[1])
Family reasons (most common with recent immigrants or permanent residents)
Marriage to a foreigner
Business opportunities (e.g. American corporations in the Persian Gulf and East Asia)
Religious reasons
Political disenchantment/issues
Access to benefits and health reasons (see Universal health care)
Evasion of legal liabilities (e.g. crimes, taxes, loans, etc.)

Net effect

The United States is a net immigration country, meaning more people are arriving to the U.S. than leaving it. Many of the emigrants from the United States do not plan to become permanent emigrants, but to be expatriates (expats) for a limited amount of time. There is a scarcity of official records in this domain.^[2] Given the high dynamics of the emigration-prone groups, emigration from the United States remains indiscernible from temporary country leave.

Statistics

As of 2014, there are over 8.7 million non-military U.S. citizens living abroad,^[3]^[4] an increase from the 4 million estimated in 1999.^[5] However, these numbers are highly open to dispute as they often are unverified and can change rapidly.^[6]

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.^[7]

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 (wages, salaries, etc.) 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.^[8] This imposes a lower (and very imprecise) 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" (i.e., income other than interest, dividends, and other "passive income") from foreign sources on their foreign tax credit forms.^[8] 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.^[9]

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 FATCA, 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.^[10]

Overseas US populations

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 (the numbers of Americans resident in Canada and Mexico, for example, are believed to be well over one million). In all other cases, starting with Israel, the figures are estimates of part-time US resident Americans and expatriates alike.

European Union – 800,000 (2013; all EU countries combined)