Americans are leaving. We exist to track them.
A decade of climate disasters, contested elections and wars fought without a congressional vote has pushed the question "should I leave the US?" from theoretical to practical for millions of American households.
No federal agency counts the people who go. Journalists still cite an unsourced 2002 estimate. Think tanks have noticed the trend but haven't built the infrastructure to measure it. American Emigration Revue exists to fill that gap: original reporting, primary-source data and a weekly brief on Americans living and leaving abroad.
Departure used to be a luxury question. Now it is a planning question.
The instinct to leave has always existed in American life. What's new in the 2020s is who's having the conversation.
No longer only retirees, the wealthy or the politically alienated, but the professional class, academics, young families and diaspora-eligible Americans (Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish, Latin American, Filipino) for whom a second passport has moved from sentimental to practical.
Almost nobody measures the total. The Census doesn't count it. The State Department won't. Receiving countries publish the data, often in languages and formats English-language journalism hasn't been built to read. AER exists to compile it.
This isn't slowing. It's accelerating.
Every measurable indicator bends upward: permits, naturalizations, renunciations, visas, settlements. The 2020 dip recovered within two years, and 2024 set records.
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's been no federal census of Americans abroad since 1976. The most-cited figure, nine million, has no published source. That's not a technical gap. It's an institutional failure.
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 reason goes back decades. The United States doesn't maintain a federal civil register like most European countries. Residential address is tracked at the driver's license level, not the federal level, and the Census Bureau dropped Americans abroad from the decennial count in 1976.
What's left are partial touchpoints: tax filings, passport renewals, absentee ballot requests. Each measures a slice of the population. None add up to a count. The Federal Voting Assistance Program's biennial model comes closest, but it's a model, not a census.
AER was founded on a simple proposition: if the American state won't count its emigrants, the only available alternative is to ask the receiving states. Every host country with a functional statistical agency publishes something. Residence permits. Naturalizations. Work permits. Census tabulations.
That premise drives every piece of work we publish.
Here's how we fix it.
AER publishes across four formats: articles, research data, a weekly brief and audio. All four share the same sourcing standards and editorial voice, covering what AER considers the most underreported demographic story of the decade.
Articles
Original reporting, policy moments and the politics of leaving. Recent leads: Portugal's residence wave, Mexico's census reconciliation, Ghana's Year of Return economics.
Read Latest›Research
The AER data project: A 99-country dashboard: time series, country profiles, the transparency index, the discrepancies catalogue. Built by 26 specialists across 24 countries.
Explore the Dashboard›Newsletter
The week's developments in American emigration, condensed into one sourced brief. Estimates flagged as estimates. No marketing.
Subscribe Free›Podcast
Conversations with researchers, diplomats, policymakers, Americans abroad. Launch series: Inside the Bureaucracy of Global Mobility · Diaspora Voices.
Get Launch Notice›Built on practice. Checked in the open.
For journalists on deadline, researchers building on this data or officials 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, and a multilingual research network reading primary sources in their original languages.
The editor.
Daniel Atz is the Editor in Chief of AER, a practitioner before he was a publisher. Over the past decade his advisory firm helped more than 3,000 Americans obtain dual citizenship, building one of the larger private-sector datasets on outbound American mobility.
His Luxembourg citizenship study, a demographic analysis built on public open data and anonymized case files, ran four editions through 2023 and was recognized by national open-data authorities and cited by CNN, Folha de S. Paulo and RTL Luxembourg. The editorial staff and country specialists at AER apply that same approach, public sources, published methods, named attribution, to every country it covers.
And a research network reading the primary sources.
A research network of country specialists reads primary sources in their original languages, from legal codes to national statistical agencies to host-country administrative records. Researchers are credited individually in the published country reports and the compendium, so readers know whose reading of the record they're citing.
The dataset, as it stands.
The AER dataset refreshes continuously across 99 jurisdictions. Records requests, FOIA-equivalent filings for administrative data, are ongoing, and released data is published on country pages as it arrives.
The map of where Americans actually land.
Top EU destinations by valid US-citizen residence permits, 2024, versus 2015. Spain, France and the Netherlands lead on volume. Portugal leads on growth: its 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.
Essential data for those who need it most
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.