She coped by volunteering in her community, but that did little to calm her fears. The more news stories she read about Trump’s second term, the more she foresaw a time when ordinary Americans would be stripped of their civil rights and live under martial law. That didn’t look like much of a future.
Inflation had also made it hard to save money, and the couple’s economic prospects seemed uncertain. Even though she was making six figures working for a large bank, things felt tight. Debi and Bane worried about retirement. They sold blood plasma to pad their bank accounts.
“The American Dream is something you’re told about to make you part of a system that clearly doesn’t work anymore,” Bane said during one of our conversations. “I want to be where the government cares about you and takes care of you and is you.”
Every four years, a group of Americans threatens to leave the country. These proclamations tend to take place in early November and involve Canada. No mass exodus occurs. Moving is hard; moving countries is harder. There are families, jobs, pets in the mix. This time around, though, Americans seem to be acting on their desires. The State Department doesn’t keep close track of how many Americans settle abroad, but immigration lawyers told me that the number of people approaching them about it has gone up since Trump was reëlected. “Anecdotally, there’s a noticeable increase,” Sanjay Sethi, an American attorney who recently relocated to Geneva, told me. “What’s been so surprising is how much I’m hearing in my personal life—the desire to leave or get another passport.”
Migration is never simple, but money helps. At least half the world’s nations offer visas or fast-track citizenship to foreigners in exchange for investments or cash. According to Eric Major, whose company, Latitude, helps people apply for such programs, citizenship-by-investment clients once primarily came from places with limited civil and economic freedoms—Russia, China, Iran. Now the majority of them come from the U.S. “We are seeing an increase in Americans actioning a Plan A (full outright migration, with a view of leaving the US) as opposed to just securing a Plan B,” Major told me in an e-mail. “We just signed up a NASA lady (moving to Portugal), a SpaceX guy (moving to Malta), and a Cornell University professor (moving to London).”
For Americans without much money, grandparents can be a golden ticket. Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens have sought out second passports since last fall, hunting down birth registrations, marriage certificates, and records from synagogues and churches. By one estimate, forty per cent of Americans could be eligible for another citizenship. Failing that, online influencers advertise alternative paths to a beautiful, affordable, gun- and car-free life style: using Social Security payments to qualify for a Portuguese passive-income visa, skirting Thai laws with regular “visa runs” to Cambodia, or exploiting Albania’s generosity—twelve months visa-free!—to try out the Mediterranean.
This ever-proliferating content often glosses over bureaucracy, crime, and the fact that Westerners tend to sequester themselves in spaces that locals can’t afford. Anywhere must be cheaper—and less stressful—than America is today. A recent survey by the Harris Poll, a research firm, found that nearly half of its respondents had considered leaving the U.S., citing politics and the cost of living as their main factors. There’s a historical irony to these responses. Americans are looking to emigrate for the same reasons that immigrants once came to America—for safety, economic security, better opportunities, and an over-all sense that their families would have a better future.
Americans are also afraid. Between January and November, sixty-seven U.S. citizens (many of them transgender) have requested asylum in the Netherlands; last year, there were nine. No applications have been approved this year. In October, a Rutgers professor named Mark Bray moved to Spain after receiving death threats at his home prompted by a petition, from the school’s chapter of the conservative group Turning Point USA, to have him fired. Bray is a scholar of antifascism, “so the dynamics of this aren’t alien to me per se,” he told me. “But you know the Nietzsche quote ‘If you stare long enough into the void, the void stares back’? Everything I’d been writing about was suddenly looking at me through the void.”
Debi and Bane’s contingency planning was frantic at first, spurred on by “extreme, zombie-apocalypse scenarios,” as Debi remembered it. They envisioned having their passports revoked, or being detained for having said the wrong things. Debi was especially preoccupied with Project 2025, a blueprint for the country conceived by the Heritage Foundation. Trump had distanced himself from the conservative think tank during his campaign, but once in office he openly pushed to sign its prescriptions into law.
When her life went on as usual, albeit against a backdrop of disturbing headlines, she said, “it evolved to ‘Why do we have to wait for something extreme to happen?’ ”