Emigration from the United States

Emigration from the United States is the process where individuals born in the United States move to live in other countries. The process is the reverse of the immigration to the United States.

For the first centuries of its existence, the U.S. attracted large masses of immigrants, and it continues to be a net immigration country.

The United States does not keep track of emigration, and counts of Americans abroad are thus only available courtesy of statistics kept by the destination countries.

The United States is a net immigration country, meaning more people are arriving to the U.S. than leaving it. Many of the emigrants from the United States do not plan to become permanent emigrants, but to be expatriates (expats) for a limited amount of time. There is a scarcity of official records in this domain. Given the high dynamics of the emigration-prone groups, emigration from the United States remains indiscernible from temporary country leave.

As of June 2016, the State department's consular section estimated that there are 9 million non-military U.S. citizens living abroad, an increase from the 4 million estimated in 1999. However, these numbers are highly open to dispute as they often are unverified and can change rapidly.

One reasonably "hard" indicator of the US citizens' population overseas is offered by the fact that often when they have a child born to them abroad, they obtain a Consular Report of Birth Abroad from a US consulate as a proof of the child's U.S. citizenship. The Bureau of Consular Affairs reports issuing 503,585 such documents over the decade 2000-2009. Based on this, and on some assumptions about the family composition and birth rates, some authors estimate the US civilian population overseas as between 3.6 and 4.3 million.

Sizes of certain subsets of US citizens living abroad can be estimated based on statistics published by the Internal Revenue Service. US Citizens are generally liable for US income tax even if they reside overseas; however, if they receive earned income (wages, salaries, etc.) while residing in a foreign country, they can exclude an amount of foreign earned income from the US taxation or receive credit for foreign taxes paid. The IRS reported that almost 335,000 tax returns with such a foreign-earned income exclusion form were received in 2006. This imposes a lower (and very imprecise) bound on the number of US citizens who were living and working in foreign countries at the time.

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