Although this is a best-guess number, this cite claims that 6.32 million Americans currently live abroad (not including US military).
Putting them all together, they would make up a population that would be the 17th most populace state.
Having spent over a decade in Germany, this number seems almost low to me.
I know that in Berlin alone I would meet lots and lots of Americans who had lived there for decades. My guess is that many of these people are probably no longer even registered/counted in US tallies. It seemed like no matter where I visited - Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, UK, Spain, Netherlands - I would run into other Americans who had lived there for many years and had assimilated to the point you would never know they were American unless they felt like sharing the fact.
I suppose that number also include speople like my son, who at seven has spent a total of one week in the United States and doesn’t speak a word of English; neither of his parents and only two of his grandparents were born in America.
Compared to other countries, this figure isn’t even that unusual.
Take for instance Switzerland: There are 6.6 Million Swiss citizens of whom more than 10 % are living outside the country.
I would also assume that among the American citizens living abroad there is certainly a number of persons who are naturalized citizens who decided to go back to their country of origin.
How do they do it? Since Switzerland isn’t a member of the EU, I assume its citizens don’t have any automatic right to work and live in another country. Moreover, neither does it seem like the kind of country whose people are desperate to get out.
For the EU itself, though, I’d be surprised if many of its member countries have high numbers of citizens living in other member countries.
Then it’s like comparing apples to oranges. A would-be expat needs to meet two requirements in normal circumstances: the ability to leave and the destination country’s permission to settle and work there. Most Americans can easily meet the first requirement, but the second one not so much.
There was a recent ad campaign here that went (paraprasing):
New Zealand is a country of 5.5million people - A million of us are overseas right now.
Which seems about right, between those of us who can get dual citizenship with the countries of our parents’ birth and those of us on extended OE’s (travelling while young , gap year type thing) and those [del]stealing aussie jobs[/del] helping the neighbours.
The second one is easy enough if you are a certain type of person - one who works for a company with a global presence. Most Americans I’ve met who don’t live in America are people who’ve moved within their company to a factory/office in a different country.
For that reason I would imagine that most Americans who emigrate to live somewhere else are not people who work at the lower end of the pay scale; they are professional, educated people.
I don’t know. There are plenty of Americans bumming around places with a low-cost-of-living picking up English teaching gigs, tending expat bars and doing odd jobs to keep the vacation going.
One also cannot dismiss Americans who are married to citizens of different countries.
I think the number is low, too. I’m pretty sure they counted me, since the IRS knows where I am, but I haven’t registered with the Consulate or anything since I’m a citizen here too. Do people still do that?
That’s really more a work assignment than a choice driven by a more deeply seated desire to emigrate. You come back to the States when it’s over, and in any event there’s a limited number of occupations or job descriptions where such a thing would normally be possible. If you aren’t there to teach English, you’re likely to belong to a small elite within your organization that includes such jobs as plant or branch manager, vice presidencies, and so on. You’re not likely to be sent to open the new branch office in Dortmund if you haven’t already been running a branch office in the States for years. Your day-to-day job activities deal less with actually making the product or performing the service than with strategy, high level organizing, and generating new business. If that’s the type of person you are, that’s great; but if you aren’t I doubt if it’s even possible to strive honestly and successfully to reach the level of responsibility I’m talking about just because you hope to be sent to another country.
By contrast, there’s theoretically no barrier in the way of a Dublin auto mechanic who wants to move to Italy to practice his trade there. Of course, he needs to find a job in Italy, which isn’t terribly easy right now, but regardless, he is allowed to seek a job on a level playing field with Italian mechanics.
I think this even applies within the same profession. The ones who go abroad are the top level managers in those fields.
Having grown up during the Cold War, it’s quite interesting to recall that, back then, the main problem for many international migrants was that their nasty Communist governments kept them fenced in. Today it’s almost entirely about the fact that a would be emigrant has to find a country that will have him, provided he doesn’t want to be an undocumented worker, with all that that entails.