How many Americans live abroad? No one knows.
Since the November 2024 US election, emigration inquiries have reached the highest sustained levels operators in the field have recorded. The underlying question is older. How many US citizens currently live outside the United States, and where are they? No federal agency is in a position to say.
The United States does not count its citizens abroad.
The most-cited figure, nine million, is not a counted number. The 2024 Federal Voting Assistance Program estimate places it at 3.3 million; other respected estimates run to five million; the Congressional Research Service has declined to commit. The structural reason: the United States does not maintain a federal civil register on the European model, address is captured at the driver's licence rather than at the federal level, and the Census Bureau excluded Americans abroad from the decennial enumeration in 1976. What remains are voluntary touchpoints (tax filings, passport renewals, absentee ballot requests), each measuring a partial subset, none aggregating to a count.
AER was founded to remediate the absence.
The American Emigration Revue is a research publication on US citizens living abroad. It curates the news, the policy developments, the academic literature, and the primary data on a population the federal apparatus declines to enumerate. The editorial premise is simple: if the American state will not count its emigrants, the only available alternative is to ask the receiving states.
From one researcher's audit to a continuously crawled, 99-jurisdiction dataset.
The project was built in stages, and each stage is preserved in the record: what was collected, when and from which official source.
Counted, not modeled. Six rules the dataset lives by.
01We count; we don't estimate.
No models, no extrapolation. Every number is one a government actually published. Where no figure is published, the dataset says so. The gap is the finding.
02Receiving states are the source.
The United States doesn't count its emigrants, so we ask the countries that receive them, across five domains: stock, inflows, outflows, naturalizations and permits.
03Every figure names its source.
Each data point carries the issuing authority, the dataset it came from, and its vintage. Exports reproduce the source line, so citations survive the copy-paste.
04Comparability is graded, not assumed.
A census stock and a permit register don't measure the same thing. Metrics carry a comparability rating so cross-country reads stay honest.
05Editions, not silent edits.
The crawl is continuous, and the dataset is released as dated editions. Every view and every export states the data it was drawn from, as of when.
06Open to challenge, free to cite.
Scores and figures are published with a challenge process; every submission is adjudicated. The transparency index is citable under CC BY 4.0.
A measurement of who publishes, and who does not.
The cross-country comparison required a measurement that did not yet exist. The AER transparency index scores each country 0 to 5 on how completely its public statistical apparatus exposes US-citizen-disaggregated data across five domains: stock, inflows, outflows, naturalizations and work permits. A low score does not mean few Americans live there; it means we cannot know from public sources alone. The full ranked index, all 99 jurisdictions, domain by domain, is public, in full, here. The index itself scores only what governments publish of their own accord.
The AER Interactive Dashboard
A professional analytics dashboard covering 99 countries. Host-country statistics, US federal series, time series, the transparency scores, demographics, subnational settlement and the country profiles, interactive, queryable, every view shareable, updated continuously as crawls land. Access comes with the subscription.
Single-Country Briefs
Single-country intelligence briefs are available directly; regional volumes and the complete 767-page compilation are licensed to institutions on request. Custom research on commission.