The federal forms Americans abroad use to register no longer let voters say they’ve never lived in the U.S. The change came through emergency approval weeks before midterm ballots went out.
Credit: mphillips007 / iStock via Getty Images
One email, every week. The developments in American emigration: sourced, sharp, short. Free, from day one.
The AER Americans Abroad Dashboard is the first dashboard to use data from 99 foreign governments to explain how many Americans live abroad.
Every country is scored from 0 to 5 on how openly it reports the Americans living there. This year Denmark and Sweden lead at a perfect 5, with a cluster just behind.
Five CARICOM states operate citizenship-by-investment programs whose grants include free movement across the region. U.S. nationals are plausibly the largest single applicant group, yet they appear in neither set of records: not in destination-country resident tallies, not in U.S. emigration data.
Eurostat is the only destination-country statistical system that publishes harmonized, country-disaggregated migration data on U.S. nationals. The decade ending in 2025 reveals four overlapping American stories in Europe that pull in different directions.
Gulf Cooperation Council states track foreign nationals by nationality for visa management and security purposes but publish almost none of the resulting data. The U.S. resident population across the GCC, plausibly between 50,000 and 80,000 people, represents the clearest example of administrative capacity that does not translate into public disclosure.
Americans moving to Spain have made it one of the top destinations for U.S. expatriates, with Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia drawing the biggest share of new arrivals. More than 50,000 U.S. expats are currently living in Spain, a figure that has only continued to rise. In fact, in the last two years, the number of […]
Coverage of Americans living abroad still comes in fragments, one country at a time, an anecdote, an estimate nobody can source. AER was built to document the whole of it, tracking how American emigration actually moves: who leaves, where they land, whether they stay, whether they claim a second citizenship.
