A brain drain is coming for America — and it’s going to be catastrophic

Online, Alyssa Bolaños is a magnet for outrage.

“Will be hilarious when you move back,” someone commented on the video she posted a month after arriving in Uruguay with her husband and two kids. “No way I’d raise my kids under that,” another replied to a video she posted of shopping malls in the South American country.

Bolaños didn’t mince her words in response: “Too bad for your kids. Have fun with them getting shot at school in the U.S.”

Bolaños was supposed to be proof of the American Dream. A native New Yorker from a Cuban-American background, her family came over to the U.S. with dreams of making a better life for themselves. Some of her cousins are “Marielitos,” part of the mass exodus of Cubans who arrived in Florida on small boats from the island nation in 1980.

Unlike other refugees, Cubans were given a special “wet foot, dry foot” status, meaning that they were allowed to stay in the country and to apply for a green card legally, once they made it to U.S. soil. Until Barack Obama ended the policy in 2017, that meant that there was effectively no way to illegally enter the US if you were Cuban — and that you were almost guaranteed a green card and eventual naturalization once you arrived.

​​“We Cubans had a very privileged immigration journey to the United States,” she says. “You know, wet foot, dry foot, you’ve got here — boom, you got asylum, you got a path to citizenship. And Cubans forget that.” When her family members see videos of ICE agents aggressively detaining other Latinos now, “they just think that they are so far removed because ‘oh, well, we’re not like them. We’re citizens. We came here legally.’ And I think legal is arbitrary in that sense. You got lucky!”

Like most Cuban Americans, Bolaños’ relatives are mostly Republicans. Most of them voted for Donald Trump and continue to support him.

“My grandmother would call me a communist,” she says, with a laugh. “I’m like: I’m not a communist, Abuela, I’m a social democrat.”

During the Obama administration and the first four years under Trump, Bolaños worked in immigration. Again, this is not unusual for somebody from her background: Latinos make up more than 50% of Border Patrol agents in the United States, as well as almost a quarter of ICE agents. The reasons for this seem to be because the job is highly paid and stable. Immigration officers are also needed in the states where Latinos are most likely to live, near the southern border in states like New Mexico, California and Texas. And in a country where most immigrants and refugees come from Spanish-speaking countries, being able to speak the language is a distinct advantage.

Bolaños was comfortable in her immigration job for years. She felt that she was mainly helping out families who were trying to improve their lives and navigate a difficult system. But then, during the first Trump administration, things started to change.

“I left the field because of the policies he was putting in place,” she says. How she saw those policies playing out on the ground began to affect both her mental and physical health. “My whole family’s immigrants,” she adds. “So I really went into it wanting to help people like our family.” In the end, she walked away feeling “defeated and just broken down.” She still offers her services freelance to families who need it, but she knew by the end of the first four years of Trump that she never wanted to work in an official capacity for the United States again.

Things quietened down a little when Biden was president. But then came 2024, and a second Trump term.

“This January came around and very quickly things got even worse than the first time,” she says, “and that was kind of our sign of: OK, no, we can’t do this again. We can’t live in this country. And we left.”

Within weeks of Trump winning the election, Bolaños and her husband “made a very rushed plan to leave by the end of summer.” They enrolled their two children — boys aged four and six — in a “world schooling” curriculum with a program called Boundless Life, which provides co-working hubs and educational centers specifically tailored to travelling expat families (their “hubs” include Tuscany, a small town in Portugal, the Greek island of Syros, and the current location of the Bolaños family: the upscale seaside town of La Barra in Uruguay.) They sold their possessions and said goodbye to their families. They now plan to spend a couple of years travelling the world, before settling permanently in the place they feel is best for their family. They do not intend to return.

“We were very scared to raise our children in a place where their parents could be detained just because we spoke Spanish, despite being citizens,” she says. “That was a really big fear of ours.” As time has gone on since they made their decision, she’s only felt more and more that it was the right one. Her kids don’t do active shooter drills. Her neighbors don’t watch breathless, divisive, fear-mongering news programs that make them look at each other with suspicion. Healthcare is easily accessed and affordable. The pace of life is slower, more manageable, and more child-friendly.

Bolaños gets a lot of criticism online, as well as a lot of support. She often gets angry DM’s from Americans who want to either let her know that she’ll come crawling back eventually or that they’re glad liberals like her are leaving. But just as often, she hears from people who are also planning to move their families out of the United States. “We’re out as of Jan 2nd and cannot wait to exit this hellscape,” wrote one commenter when Bolaños announced their plans at the beginning of the year.

There are foreigners, too, who follow Bolaños online and want to let her know that they once thought they’d move to the US and have now decided against it. “Growing up, the dream as a foreigner was to live in America,” one wrote, a few weeks ago. “Maturing is being glad you didn’t grow up in America.”

The reactions are mixed, in other words, but there’s one reaction — one particular phrase — that’s surprisingly common. Again and again, this phrase is repeated by various commenters on videos she’s posted throughout the year, and it’s a phrase that resonates with her deeply: “The new American Dream is leaving America.”

The countries making a play for American expats

One of the reasons Alyssa Bolaños can make a living out of documenting her family’s experience expatriating from the United States on social media is because there is now a huge amount of interest in doing so. In May, the UK’s Home Office announced that it was dealing with a record number of Americans seeking British residency, with 2,000 applications having been submitted in the first six months of 2025 alone. The amount of Americans moving abroad in the first quarter of 2025 was more than double the amount who did the same in 2024. And a recent survey done by Harris Poll found that four in 10 Americans say they are interested in moving abroad for a better life; most alarmingly, that rises to more than half of all millennials and more than six in 10 members of Gen Z.

But it’s not just the people who are currently planning to leave who should be of concern to the US: it’s the people who will never arrive. College enrollment has been down across the country for a number of years, partly due to a demographic shift caused by people having fewer children. It nosedived recently after the Trump administration’s change to student visas kept out the international students who would usually make up for the falling numbers of Americans. This sudden drop — a decline of 30-40 percent in new students from abroad, and 15 percent in international student enrollment in this academic year — could end up costing the US economy $7 billion.

Already sensing a brain drain after Trump’s attacks on elite universities, other countries have sought to take advantage. France’s new Lafayette Scholarship, launched in September, will sponsor 30 exceptional Masters-level American students in any area of study — from science and engineering to humanities and the arts — to move to “one of France’s top 15 institutions” for a year, clearly intending to tempt America’s finest to consider positions outside their homeland for their academic careers. Aix-Marseille University went even further, launching a “Safe Place for Science” program that promised to sponsor American scientists whose work was threatened by the Trump administration. The first “scientific refugees” under this program — a group of eight Americans working in areas as diverse as climate change research and biological anthropology — arrived in France in July.

Elsewhere, the Free University of Brussels announced in March that it was actively seeking to help “excellent researchers currently working in the US which see their line of research threatened” to relocate. Three decorated Yale University professors — all of them experts in either fascism or historical authoritarian regimes — recently moved to Toronto University in Canada. And Chinese institutions have been actively reaching out to American researchers about Trump’s “anti-science revolution,” to much fanfare from the Chinese media.

A poll conducted earlier in the year found that three-quarters of research scientists at American universities are actively considering leaving the country. Another survey, conducted among postdoctoral researchers working at colleges across the country, found that more than half of all postdocs had been directly impacted by the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding to universities within just six weeks of the decision being announced. Many were turning up to their jobs every day and sitting at their desks or outside labs, unable to continue with their research because federal funds had been suddenly stopped. In a country where almost 90 percent of research is dependent on federal funds, that’s a serious problem — for the country as a whole, but also for academics’ careers.

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On social media, content about leaving the US has exploded. Since 2021, content produced by influencers who have left America and are now seeking to make money remotely by documenting their everyday lives on Tiktok and Instagram has become increasingly popular. Even on Reddit, where usernames are anonymous and content is image-free, the community of people expressing an interest in leaving America has grown exponentially in the past four years. The subreddit r/AmerExit — a place specifically for Americans to share tips about the logistics of moving abroad — has 171,000 weekly visitors and over 1,000 posts per week.

“I moved from Tucson to Copenhagen a month ago! Love my hometown, but god damn public transit and access to affordable healthcare is so nice,” writes one recent contributor. “I love love love not owning a car, and not feeling deprived because I don’t,” writes another, who says he moved to Scotland.

A quick scroll through the posts shows that almost everyone in the planning stages of leaving the US is a graduate or a skilled worker in roles that remain in demand inside the country: an architect looking to move to the Netherlands, a commercial truck driver heading to Canada, an IT consultant hoping to move to Denmark, a software engineer and speech-language pathologist hoping to move their young family to “France, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, or Japan”.

Uruguay — the current location of Alyssa Bolaños’ family — is a popular choice. One poster, who describes himself as a cybersecurity expert, echoes the reasons given by most others for their departure plans: “I am a father of 3 and me [and] my wife are considering moving abroad given the current climate in the US. We no longer feel safe – daily school shootings, daily kidnappings by federal agencies, etc.” In just two, matter-of-fact sentences, it’s a damning indictment of the America Trump promised to make great again.

The very rich are looking for a Plan B

For Mohamed Bennis, the jump in American expatriation is simply good business. An associate vice president at Arton Capital, a company that “empowers high net worth individuals and families to become global citizens by investing in a second residence or citizenship,” he says he’s experienced a large increase in interest from Americans over the past year.

“The nationality of people that made the most requests to our company in the last 12 months have been US,” says Bennis. Those include “tech people who can be more mobile, who are on the verge of selling companies or the end cycle of running a company. So it’s not 30-year-olds who are calling us. They’re in their 40s all the way up to their 60s, pre-retirement.” These people have a business strategy or “a liquidity event” on the horizon: in other words, they’re about to come into a large sum of cash. And they want to spend that cash on making sure they can leave America in the next few years.

Bennis specializes in “golden visas,” i.e. visas that can be bought for large sums of cash by very wealthy people, circumventing the usual immigration requirements, such as the “Citizenship by Investment” path in Malta, which grants citizenship to the country after 12 months of residency for 750,000 euros ($871,000) plus a 700,000 euro ($813,000) property investment and 10,000 euro ($12,000) charitable donation. That means he’s in a good position to predict a brain drain, because his clients come to him years in advance of planning to move. A golden visa takes a long time to arrange and requires months of logistics; pursuing it is costly, time-consuming, and only for people who are sure they need an insurance policy against being stuck in America long-term. In other words, golden visa applicants are either mid-career or imminently planning a retirement where they plan to spend huge amounts of money. And they’re betting against the US being a good place to live in the future.

“They’re looking at relocating in the next three to five years, and they want to make sure they have access when that happens,” says Bennis. “…You don’t do it when you’re ready to move, with the golden visa — you do it that little bit ahead of time, so you’ve grandfathered your place in.” It sounds a little like Elon Musk’s view of Earth when he talks about space travel: a great place to live for now, but one where you almost certainly need a solid exit plan.

Interest in golden visas has been “exponential,” Bennis adds, partly because of how the political winds have changed. People who once assumed they could easily expatriate are now seeing anti-immigrant sentiment explode across the globe. And recent protests against wealthy expats driving up living costs in lower-income countries have made the rich fearful that they might not have the freedom they once did to go wherever they pleased. As Bennis puts it, “We took for granted our mobility, and now we see that it’s not going to be the same — there’s no more status quo in mobility.”

Bennis works with a lot of very rich people, but he’s also started to see middle class Americans expressing an interest in expatriating in the same way. “It’s not unheard of to invest 250,000 euros [$290,000] to get a property in Greece and get residency there,” he says. “I mean, that’s still manageable for someone who has a decent job and a few assets in the United States — we’re not talking about millions. It’s still a product that can be really accessible for middle class, upper middle class, and of course high net worth individuals to have a Plan B in a residency elsewhere.”

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Retirees are surprisingly important to the American economy: the National Institute on Retirement Security recently found that their spending alone fuels $1.5 trillion in economic output across the US per year, as well as 7.1 million jobs and over $224 million in tax revenue. If US workers choose to spend their pension income elsewhere, that “giant-sized economic footprint that benefits virtually every community across the country” — as it was described by NIRS’s executive director Dan Doonan when he co-published the report — will be lost, to huge effect.

A different kind of future

Alyssa Bolaños and her family are settling into Uruguay: the people are kind and the air is clean, and her kids look forward to school every morning. But there are challenges, too. For one thing, Uruguay is not a very diverse country, which is reflected in its culinary offerings: “I can’t find Cuban coffee — or if I have a craving and I want Mexican food, it’s not happening.”

Her eldest son especially misses family and his home comforts.

“My oldest is like, ‘Why can’t we go back to Florida?’” she says. “And I have to try to navigate in a nice way. How do I explain that Florida’s not safe because they don’t like people that speak Spanish like us? It’s hard. And I think really the only way I combat that is by traveling with them and showing them that there are so many good places in the world.”

For Alyssa, America has always been about its immigrants: the opportunity to sample different foods, to get to know people from across the world, and to widen one’s perspective. She thinks fondly on her upbringing in New York, and it especially saddens her that the city might change and become less diverse as a result of Trump’s policies.

“New York was this huge global melting pot, and I grew up with so many different cultures around me that even when I traveled for the first time out of the country, I already felt like I’d been other places,” she says, “because you go uptown and you go to the Heights for Dominican food or where I was raised in Corona, Queens was half-Italian, half-Mexican, and Jackson Heights had Colombian food. So it does sadden me that the rest of the country can’t understand how beautiful it is to have that blending of culture and how that makes the US so special.”

What does an America that rejects this blend of communities look like? The data offers an unsettling preview. And though it’s all being done in the name of economic growth, the numbers also show that it’s the economy itself that stands to lose the most.