Prompted by the Denmark=happy thread in GD, What country is the main destination for US emigrants?
For my purposes, let’s exclude Latino US citizens returning to Latin American nations, Asian-Americans to places like the Philippines or China, etc. I want to avoid “going back home” or family reasons, even if the emigrants left as full US citizens.
I’d imagine Canada would be highest, due to proximity. After that, would one of the European countries like England have the most? More than Japan or Australia? Israel? Dubai?
I don’t know the actual answer but Mexico has lots of U.S. retirees. I have been to Costa Rica and they claim that the population is 1% U.S. expats which seems high but makes sense all things considered. There are whole towns in Costa Rica built to serve U.S. expats and the rest of the population is U.S. friendly anyway. I could easily live there and there aren’t many drawbacks. It is fairly hard to move to most of western Europe without good reason like a very specialized job. Canada and the U.S. are basically the same thing for all intents and purposes unless you get nitpicky. I know lots of Canadians including my wife’s family that live in the U.S. but not too many vice versa but that is undoubtly due to the large population differences.
Costa Rica used to be a very cheap place to retire but that is changing. It may still be relatively cheap but the trend is not in that direction. The country is being sliced, diced and marketed by developers, especially along the coasts.
Canada can be undesirable because of the universal health care restrictions. US citizens at retirement age will move back to the USA in order to qualify for Medicare because they can’t get similar coverage under the Canadian health care laws.
Canada’s easy. They even have an online test simulator to see if you qualify. Obviously if you’re some uneducated, poor schlub that only speaks one language, you’ll have a tough time.
I have seen claims that there are as many as 100,000 people with American citizenship in Calgary (overall population 1M) alone. Mind you, that’s a lot of that due to the oil business here and I wouldn’t expect as high a percentage in, say, Winnipeg or Halifax, but it’s a significant amount.
I’m not entirely certain I believe that claim, though.
I used to live in Ottawa, but I was working for a Canadian company (CNG) and was still an American citizen. I knew a lot of Americans working in Canada but every one of them was a US citizen.
Sorry, can’t even hazard a guess as to the answer to the OP. A quick google search turned up…well, a whole lot of nothing. Most ex-American populations in other countries where the people actually gave up their US citizenship seems pretty small. Lots of Americans living abroad AS Americans…but I can’t find a lot of folks who have actually given up their citizenship to move elsewhere. At least not with any kind of large scales.
It’s not infeasible. Until the oil tar sands opened up, there’d have been little reason for Americans to be there. Now – big reason. And the native-Canadian-trained petroelum engineer/tool pusher (heh heh)/roustabout population must be, not small, but small-ish.
I hope you bought property, or a business, or a brothel, there five years ago.
Considering everything I’m reading about Dubai, there’s not many Americans there. Lots of Brits and Irish, but relatively few Yanks. Seems like some real estate developments consist entirely of footballers, and we’re not talking about the NFL either.
A little out of date, but here’s a government document from 1999 giving estimates. Note that the numbers are by consulate, not by city; I assume this means that the numbers are for the entire area served by that consulate, not just the city it’s located in. For a nice collation of the data, you can look at this PDF spreadsheet.
For those who want the short version, the top five countries in absolute numbers are:
[ol]
[li]Mexico (1.04 million)[/li][li]Canada (687,000)[/li][li]UK (224,000)[/li][li]Germany (211,000)[/li][li]Israel (184,000)[/li][/ol]
and by percentage of the population is
[ol]
[li]Bermuda (6.7%)[/li][li]Barbados (4.6%)[/li][li]Israel (3.1%)[/li][li]Netherlands Antilles (2.9%)[/li][li]Bahamas (2.5%)[/li][/ol]
Note that the data above indicates that 105,000 U.S. citizens are served by the Calgary consulate, but its “catchment area” includes all of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the NWT. I’d hazard a guess that maybe 40k of those U.S. citizens (at most) actually lived in Calgary.
So you are not Thai? I thought your comments about the the Thai King seemed …um not so Thai but I thought you may possibly be a very disgruntled Thai. It makes much more sense that you are a foreigner.
I am a South African citizen living in the United States as a permanent resident. I would already consider myself an expat, and when I can apply for United States citizenship I have no plans to revoke my South African citizenship.
I was under the impression that this was the most common way to do things. I think it is extremely rare to give up your old citizenship (most countries would make this extremely hard to do). I think it is orders of magnitude more common just to keep dual-citizenship.
I beg to differ. Having researched this, there are restrictions on living there, and the acceptable reasons for immigration are few. Moving there and having resident benefits is restricted to those who have Canadian family members. See this site.