Americans are leaving. We exist to track them.
In a decade of compounding shocks (climates that have burned through whole regions, elections that have reshaped the meaning of citizenship, rights withdrawn overnight, wars escalated without congressional vote), the question "should I leave?" has moved from theoretical to operational across millions of American households.
The federal apparatus does not count the people who do. The press cites a figure from 2002 that nobody can source. The think tanks notice in pieces. We built the American Emigration Revue because nobody else was: an independent research publication on US citizens abroad: original reporting, primary-source data and a weekly brief. We exist to track what nobody is tracking, to map what nobody is mapping, and to explain a transformation already well underway.
Departure used to be a luxury question. Now it is a planning question.
The instinct to leave has always existed in the American story. What is new in the 2020s is the breadth of the people having the conversation.
It is no longer confined to retirees, to the wealthy, to the politically alienated or to the long-resident dual citizens. It is now a working assumption across the professional class, the academic class, the family-formation cohort and large portions of the diaspora-eligible (Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish, Latin American, Filipino) for whom a second passport has shifted from sentimental to operational.
And almost nobody is measuring the totality of it. The Census doesn't. The State Department won't. The think tanks have begun to notice but have not built the infrastructure. The press cites a number from 2002 that nobody can source. The receiving countries publish data, much of it in languages and statistical formats that English-language journalism has not been built to read.
This is not slowing. It is accelerating.
Across every measurable indicator (residence permits, naturalisations, renunciations, student visas, settlement applications), the line bends upward. The 2020 dip recovered within two years. The 2024 totals set new records. What had been a slow accumulation through the 2010s became, after 2021, something closer to a wave, and the data we already have almost certainly understates the scale of what’s happening.
Initial residence permits issued to US citizens, all EU member states.
A decade of broadly rising issuance, a pandemic interruption, and a 2024 peak, even as the EU's own residence-permit framework tightened.
And the institutions are not keeping up.
There is no federal census of Americans abroad. There has not been one since 1976. The most-cited figure, nine million, has no published source. Five federal and advocacy estimates from the past 25 years span four million to nine million. No two agree. This is not a technical gap. It is an institutional failure across an entire information landscape.
Estimates of US citizens abroad disagree by a factor of three.
The most recent federal model puts the figure at 3.3 million. The most cited press figure, nine million, has no published source.
The structural reason is older than the current moment. The United States does not maintain a federal civil register on the European model. Residential address is captured at the driver's license, not at the federal level. The Census Bureau excluded Americans abroad from the decennial enumeration in 1976 and has not returned to it.
What remains are voluntary touchpoints (tax filings, passport renewals, absentee ballot requests), each measuring a partial subset of the population, none aggregating to a count. The Federal Voting Assistance Program’s biennial model is the most defensible single figure. It is a model. Not a census.
AER was founded on a simple proposition: if the American state will not count its emigrants, the only available alternative is to ask the receiving states. Every host country with a functional statistical apparatus publishes something: residence permits, naturalisations, work permits, census tabulations.
That premise drives every piece of work we publish. The next sections describe how.
Here's how we fix it.
AER publishes across four registers: editorial, research, a weekly brief and audio. Each shares the same standards of sourcing and the same editorial voice. All four together are how we cover the largest underreported demographic story of our era, and how we intend to disrupt an information landscape that has, until now, mostly looked away.
Articles
Original reporting on individual countries, policy moments, and the politics of leaving. Lead pieces this year on Portugal's residence wave, Mexico's Census reconciliation, and Ghana's Year of Return economics.
Read Latest›Research
The AER data project: a 99-country dashboard with time series, country profiles, the transparency index and the Discrepancies catalogue. Built with 26 country specialists across 24 countries; updated continuously as new country crawls land.
Explore the Dashboard›Newsletter
The week's developments in American emigration, condensed into a single sourced brief. Estimates flagged as estimates, every figure tracked back to its publisher. No marketing.
Subscribe Free›Podcast
Conversations with researchers, diplomats, policymakers, and Americans abroad. Launch series: Leaving America in 2025 · Inside the Bureaucracy of Global Mobility · Diaspora Voices.
Get Launch Notice›Built on practice. Checked in the open.
If you are a journalist on deadline, a researcher building on this data, or an official deciding whether to cite it, the only question that matters is whether the figures hold up. Two things stand behind them: a decade of practitioner work in the field this publication covers, and a multilingual research network reading the primary sources in their own languages.
The editor.
AER is edited by Daniel ATZ, a practitioner before he was a publisher: across the past decade his advisory firms placed more than 2,000 Americans into dual citizenship, building one of the larger private-sector datasets on outbound American mobility in the process.
The research practice predates the publication. His Luxembourg dual citizenship study (a quantitative analysis built on public open-data and anonymised case files) ran four editions through 2023, was recognised by national open-data authorities, and was cited in Folha de S. Paulo and CNN Brasil. AER applies that same discipline (public sources, published methods, named attribution) to every country it covers.
And a research network reading the primary sources.
A growing network of country specialists reads the primary sources in their own languages: legal systems, national statistical agencies, host-country administrative records. Researchers are credited individually on each country profile, so you can see whose reading of the record you are citing.
The dataset, as it stands.
Numbers from the AER data build, May 2026. The dataset refreshes continuously, crawling at scale across 99 jurisdictions. Records requests (administrative records via FOIA-equivalent filings) are an ongoing program; released data is published on country pages as it arrives, clearly badged.
The map of where Americans actually land.
Top EU destinations by total valid US-citizen residence permits, 2024, with the change since 2015. Spain, France and Germany lead on absolute volume. Portugal leads on growth rate: its US-citizen permit stock multiplied eight-fold over the decade.
Valid residence permits held by US nationals, 2015 vs 2024.
Bar shows 2024 total. Marker shows 2015 baseline. Growth multiplier in red on the right.
An audience that needs the numbers to be right.
Citation-ready figures, named expert commentary.
At outlets covering migration, economics, policy, and politics. AER provides sourced figures on deadline and a named expert available for follow-up.
The reference others reach for first.
Universities, think tanks, family offices, financial institutions, and IGOs. The AER dataset is built to be the structural anchor for cross-country comparative work.
Where the populations actually land.
Migration ministries in destination countries. Embassy and consular offices. Congressional research staff. The people whose job is to make sense of who arrived and why.
Concise, sourced, weekly.
The week's developments in American emigration, condensed into a single brief: sourcing intact, estimates flagged as estimates, every figure tracked back to its publisher. Free.