As President Donald Trump ushers in his so-called "Golden Age" for the nation, some Americans are jumping ship. Yale University history professor Marci Shore is relieved to be one of them.
She and her husband, historian Timothy Snyder, had long been on the fence about leaving the United States, Shore told Salon, with professorships at the University of Toronto available to them for at least two years should they have wished to take them. Trump's reelection in November and the proverbial smoke before the fire in the immediate aftermath made it clear to her that now was the time to pull the trigger.
"I felt like this country had everything right in front of them, and people chose this — a lot of people chose this, and that was heartbreaking," she said. "And I also felt like, 'I don't want to come back to this.' I don't want to, and maybe I'm not devoted enough. Maybe I'm not enough of a patriot. But I felt like, 'I don't want this. I don't want this for my kids. I don't want this environment.'"
Shore is a part of a small but burgeoning group of Americans who have lost faith in their country since Trump's reclaimed the presidency — who have lost hope that a good future is still possible there — and decided to seek refuge abroad. In the months since the election, and even more so after Trump's inauguration, consultants who help Americans plan their moves abroad say they've seen an uptick in interest in expatriation that goes beyond typical post-election panic. Immigration lawyers in particularly desirable destinations also say they've seen a marked rise in serious inquiries and requests for assistance with immigration paperwork from U.S. citizens.
Some soon-to-be expats say that, while they intended to leave, they haven't given up all hope for their home country. But others are more resolute in their belief that the nation is irreparable.
"I hope this will end sooner rather than later. I hope that it's not going to get as bad as I fear it is," Shore said. "But I haven't seen anything comforting yet."
Jen Barnett, the CEO and co-founder of Expatsi, a firm aimed at helping Americans plan and execute their moves abroad, told Salon that the post-election and post-inauguration spikes in the company's web traffic have translated to a greater number of clients moving from the initial ideation stage to active planning, exploring the desired location and filling out paperwork.
Clients' reasons for wanting to move have also changed during the second Trump presidency, Barnett said. Before, they flagged the lack of abortion access and gun violence in the U.S. Now, however, they raise concerns about the threats to defund the Department of Education and even the possibility of Trump imposing martial law.
"I just try to remind them that whatever does happen, they can handle it, but they're afraid," Barnett said in a phone interview. "They're afraid that the borders will close. They're afraid they won't be able to leave. They're afraid that other countries will close their borders to Americans because too many immigrants are leaving."
The news that Shore and Snyder would be leaving the country came at the end of March alongside that of their colleague Jason Stanley, a Yale professor of philosophy whose longtime study of fascism — and more recent witnessing of universities cowering under the president's pressure — set off alarm bells that made accepting a position at the University of Toronto seem like his safest option. Shore, who researches totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, said that she had felt similarly but had made her decision in December or January.
Shore said she's long been concerned about gun violence and school shootings in the U.S. because she and Snyder have two now-adolescent children. She had considered accepting a respected job in Geneva before, not long after Trump was first elected in 2016, but ultimately turned it down because she felt a moral obligation to students who looked to her to make sense of what could happen to the country under Trump.
It was an accumulation of events that did it this time around, Shore said, followed by her coming to terms with the fact that a plurality of Americans had elected Trump despite knowing who he is. The "Nazi-style" rally at Madison Square Garden was chilling, former First Lady Michelle Obama's speech on the price women pay because of restrictions on reproductive rights left her awestruck, and the secret vote ads targeting women whose husbands wanted them to vote for Trump terrified her. The most ominous sign came in mid-January, she said, when Vice President JD Vance posted on X that Snyder being a professor at Yale is "actually an embarrassment," and the university did not publicly respond.
"What scared me was, I thought, 'They're scared. The university is scared. The administration is scared. People are going to start to put their heads down and get in line because historically, that's what happens,'" Shore said.
When Shore spoke to Salon in April, she said that her family had been residing in a friend's home in Toronto since her sabbatical began for the 2024-2025 academic year as a trial run of what life would look like if they moved. Her tenure with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy will start in the fall.
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The Trump administration has pulled no punches since his inauguration in January. A flurry of executive orders cut federal funding for foreign aid, declared irregular immigration at the border an "invasion," targeted transgender Americans, rescinded diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and threatened universities and humanities institutions with funding cuts lest they comply. The government has laid off tens of thousands of federal workers, Cabinet members have shared sensitive military plans on an encrypted messaging app and Congress is weighing how much funding to cut from Medicaid and other public assistance. All the while, the president has unleashed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials onto the public, resulting in detentions and arrests of tourists, student protesters and green-card holders, U.S. citizens, and removals of immigrants to Central America without allowing them a day in court. Law scholars have called the administration's apparent defiance of court orders a "constitutional crisis," and the nation is just over 100 days in.
Since January, Trump's approval rating has tanked, with The New York Times' average of polls, including Emerson College and AP-NORC, recording a 45% approval and 51% disapproval as of May 16.
While it's unclear just how many Americans are seriously working to leave the country, expat consultants told Salon they're seeing greater interest than usual after a divisive election.
At the same time, European countries have also seen a rise in immigration interest from Americans. Data from Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs shows that the monthly average of 4,300 U.S. applications for Irish passports in January and February was up some 60% from last year, per Reuters.
In the first three months of 2025, France likewise received 2,383 long-stay visa requests from Americans compared to just 1,980 over the same period in 2024, according to government data, the news wire reported. Meanwhile, the UK received 1,708 applications for passports in the last three months of 2024, the last period for which data is available, marking a record of any quarter in the last 20 years.
Wealthy Americans are among those showing an increased interest in obtaining visas abroad, according to Stuart Nash, the CEO and founder of Nash Kelly Global in New Zealand. The former New Zealand minister of economic development, who launched the previous version of the country's Active Investor Plus visa in 2022, told Salon that the political climate and uncertainty in the U.S. are the top reasons his clients cite for wanting to obtain a New Zealand visa, but they're more often looking for a Plan B than to permanently relocate.
Immigration lawyers with Lexidy Portugal, a law firm with branches in several European countries, have also seen a marked increase in American clients interested in relocating both since the November election and January inauguration, according to senior lawyer Marta Pinto. She told Salon that, in recent months, that spike has translated into her going from having just 10 client calls per week to, at times, eight calls in a single day. If half of 20 client meetings were with Americans, some 80% of them would commit to working with the firm and beginning the process of moving to Portugal.
A portion of those clients are distant descendants seeking a second citizenship, while another crop of those clients are seeking passive income visas for retirees and digital nomad visas for remote workers, Pinto said. But many are reporting that they're "afraid that something is going to happen" or that "they don't feel secure in the U.S."
Luciano Oliveira, managing partner at Oliveira Lawyers, which serves overseas clients with interests in Portugal and Brazil, told Salon that, in general, military personnel and retirees have increasingly sought visas in those countries. But his firm has recorded a boom in Americans seeking information about and assistance with digital nomad visas and descent-citizenship applications since the second half of 2024. Since February, he added, the firm has received an influx of inquiries from LGBTQ+ Americans and same-sex couples who report feeling unsafe and uncertain about their futures in the U.S.
More than half of his new clients are still in the planning stages, while a quarter are applying for visas; the rest are purchasing real estate abroad, Oliveira said.
"Many people are coming to us saying, 'Listen, I would like to have a type of Plan B. So far things are kind of under control, but I don't know what's going to be in the future. ... We don't know if we want to move abroad, for sure, but just the option of being able to do so if we need is comforting,'" he said.
But leaving the country is the plan B for some Americans, like Margaret and her husband, Dale, who asked that they be referred to solely by their first names out of concern for their careers.
The Indianapolis couple first mulled moving out of the country in 2022 as the 2024 presidential election cycle picked up momentum. It was something of a "back pocket kind of plan" at the time, Margaret said, but they committed to immigrating to somewhere like Canada if Trump went on to win the presidency. They never actually thought that he would win — "surely," they believed, "everybody remembers what it was like the first time and will not do this again," the 53-year-old recalled thinking.
On Nov. 6, their last resort became their fast-tracked plan of action. By Thanksgiving, they had dived into research and active planning for their move, learning through an immigration expert that they wouldn't have much success relocating to Canada due to its tightened immigration pathways. By December, the couple hatched a plan to instead move to Portugal — known for its political stability, left-of-center government, universal healthcare and relative ease in granting visas — and connected with expatriation consulting firm Expatsi for guidance on the process. Margaret joined 20 other prospective expats for the company's 12-day tour of the country in February, an experience she said reminded her both of how difficult an international move would be and why they needed to make it.
"We would realize, 'Okay, if we move to another country, we will have many days like this where everything seems hard and we're just fighting uphill to do things that feel like they should be simple,'" she said, recalling some of the difficulties navigating hand laundry and chargers she and her tourmates had. "And then we would check the news on our phone and say, 'I can do hard things.'"
Now some six months removed from the election — and three into the rightwing president's second term — Margaret feels more vindicated in her decision to part with her home country than ever.
"I figured it would be bad, but I had no idea," Margaret told Salon in a phone interview,. "Honestly, even at my most paranoid, I would never believe that it would be 90 days or less from when Trump took office the second time to when we were kidnapping people off the street and sending them to foreign countries with no plan for bringing them back."
Since then, Margaret, who works as a contracts manager, said she's applied for a digital nomad visa, which will allow her to work remotely from Portugal, and her employer has been accommodating. When Margaret spoke with Salon in April, she was in the middle of a monthlong trial run working remotely to get a feel for her workflow for when she and Dale eventually move. With their visa interview with the consulate scheduled for July 16 and approval expected by mid-August, they plan to leave by the end of September.
Margaret said she recognizes that moving out of the country requires a huge amount of privilege and flexibility that most other Americans don't have, and that those "on the pointiest end of the stick" have no choice but to live through it. While she's far from being in the eye of the storm — she's white, married to a man and middle class — she said she feels that the actions the Trump administration is unleashing now are only the beginning.
"It never starts with people like me," she said. "It's just once you've decided that the rules don't apply equally to everybody, there's no particular reason to start thinking that they protect you."
As Trump's presidency continues, she said that she and Dale can no longer ignore the parallels to fascist governments of the past, especially since he's a social studies teacher. Leaving the country is the only way she sees them getting through it.
"I've described that as putting the oxygen mask on my own face first," Margaret said. "It gets more and more uncomfortable, more and more counter to what I value and believe as a person, what I thought America stood for. It's just, to have any capacity to deal with this, I need to be out of it and not taking it in the teeth."
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For freelance writer Amy DeCew, leaving the U.S. permanently has always been a dream. After years of struggling under the country's healthcare system, which brushed off the symptoms of her congenital cardiac defects as a sort of female hysteria until her late diagnosis at the age of 30, she knew she had to make her exit. President Donald Trump's second wind has just been the straw that broke the camel's back, the catalyst that told her she needed to leave as soon as possible. According to her, that means by the end of this year.
"I just feel like there isn't hope here, that this country has too long shown me that they do not want me anyway," DeCew told Salon in a phone interview.
"I feel like I've lost my country," she added.
DeCew said that she's never thought of the U.S. the way she was told to, in large part, because of the early dismissals she faced both within the nation's "dysfunctional, cruel and expensive" medical system and from others who didn't believe she could have such difficulty here. As soon as she was old enough to travel internationally by herself, she sought overseas work or research opportunities for limited stints. But she eventually always came back.
Almost a decade ago, when Trump first became the Republican nominee, she said she realized she needed to make a serious change. His reelection, capping off a decade of hardship since, became the signal that she needed to do it now. She likened it to the "boiled frog analogy" — the "impossibility" of liveable wages and affordable housing here; difficulty maintaining long-term employment due to a lack of accommodations and benefits for her chronic disability; the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol; Trump's handling of COVID-19 and the pandemic, which left her "permanently damaged" as a result of being denied care in Florida during the first wave; the rise of the anti-vaccine movement and overturn of Roe v. Wade. It's all become too much, she said.
"Now there's no due process. Now we're deporting — disappearing people. To me, that recalls a lot of regimes in history that are very frightening," she said. "I feel haunted by the ghosts of my grandfathers who served in World War Two. How, how, how did we used to fight fascism, and now we're homegrowing it?"
Primarily based in Florida, DeCew has been bouncing back and forth between the southern state, Panama and Mexico. She has a permanent residency in Panama and is working on paperwork for a temporary residency in Mexico, with hopes of living exclusively in those two countries in the near future. She said she doesn't expect her difficulties with employment to ease much when she makes the move, but she's hopeful she'll have access to new health and medical solutions and a less polarized social fabric.
Despite how she feels, DeCew said she rejects the notion that people who want to leave the country are "traitors or haters of the United States."
"I think for a lot of people, it's not about that," she said. "They wouldn't leave if they didn't feel like their life was on the line."
"I've got a vision [of America] in my head that I feel will never come to pass, that is a better version that I wish we could be but I don't have hope for and may never live to see because God knows if I'm even going to live to see tomorrow," she added. "It's not so much about hating the United States. It's just trying to survive another day for some of us."
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