Editor’s note: David A. Andelman, CNN contributor, two-time Deadline Club Award winner, knight of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A red line in the sand: diplomacy, strategy and the history of wars that can still happen” and blogs on SubStack’s Andelman released. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Europe and Asia and for CBS News in Paris. The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. To view more opinion on CNN
I have lived intermittently in France for around 44 years, sometimes quite permanently, more often peripatically, always in the same building, around the corner from the Musée d’Orsay and directly across the Seine, from the Tuileries.
We were never really forced to choose whether it should become our home, permanently. Now, along with hordes of our fellow Americans, we are considering just such a measure.
In a growing number of cases, this reason can be attributed to a close source – the former president donald trump. Or, more accurately, how he destroyed America and our democracy that, during my nearly 80 years on this planet, I have cherished.
And as I began to ask more and more widely about this concern, my wife, Pamela, and I discovered a growing sense that we are not alone.
“It’s the first thing they say, ‘get me out of here [America]’” said Adrian Leeds. For a quarter of a century, through it Adrian Leeds Group real estate agency, she has mainly advised Americans who are thinking about moving to France on how to find a place to live. “But now there is a real wave of young people who are saying, ‘We don’t want to raise our children in this country. We really want to give our children the best. And we are very unhappy,’” she told me.
And the trend appears to only be accelerating. “We’re up 100%, we’ve doubled our business year to date, from January to March, over a year ago,” Leeds continued. “It’s going so fast that the numbers are absurd. I hear it every day: ‘Get me out of here!’”
Of course, it is not only in France that such discussions take place. “As of 2020, we went from 5% of our customers to Americans, to today 70%”, says Patricia Casaburi, CEO of the London-based company Solutions for global citizens, a luxury migration consultancy firm, said in a Zoom interview in Dubai. And more recently, the number of Americans “has only been increasing,” she added.
There are certainly reasons for Americans to take a step beyond the prospects of a second Trump presidency. “When there are mass shootings in schools, they just cause people to act on something they have been considering for a while,” Casaburi said. But, she added, “definitely the political agenda influences people.”
Tony Kahn, a veteran former PBS and NPR producer, was sitting in a Mexico City hotel lobby earlier this month making exactly those calculations.
“At the very moment you ask me, I have mixed feelings about the extent to which America is my country,” Kahn said in a Zoom conversation between my perhaps not-so-temporary residence in Paris and Mexico City. In Kahn’s youth, “Mexico took us in when America didn’t want us, basically. That’s the truth. Mexico has always been home to expatriates, as long as they don’t practice politics that get them in trouble in their own country,” he said.
In 1950, at the age of eight, Kahn and his entire family fled to Mexico when his father, renowned Hollywood screenwriter Gordon Kahn, was summoned by the feared House Un-American Activities Committee over alleged communist ties to the film industry. He ended up never testifying.
His father was almost chased until the end of his life at age 62 by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Today, Kahn worries that similar dangers are not so far away on the horizon.
“There is a sense of security and belonging in Mexico,” Kahn continued. “I’m not afraid of a stranger going crazy [at me] there because I’m Jewish. At the same time, I’m not possessed by the feeling that I need to leave America right now, before it’s too late, but I’m getting close to it,” he said.
Over the past six months, he has made five trips to Mexico City with his wife, preparing for a final decision.
There are all kinds of escape routes too. There are those who are simply looking for a refuge where they can work and live without restrictions, without any pressing need to acquire a second citizenship. In France, for example, there are a number of options – from simple visas that allow people to stay beyond 90 days out of 180 under European rules, to a residence card (renewable every 10 years).
In most countries, like France, taking the next leap towards citizenship also means learning the language and customs.
Then there are the “golden passports”, where in some countries broad categories or levels of investment can be a fast track to citizenship, or a “talent passport” if you are bringing unique personal capabilities.
“Many people now know what a Trump administration will be like and are realizing more than ever that the doors are open to living in another country and that it is not as challenging as they thought it would be,” the Paris-based immigration said. lawyer Daniel Tostado told me.
Eight years ago, right at the beginning of Trump’s rise to the presidency, Skyler Schmanski became one of those Americans who made a choice. He came to France to study at a business school in Marseille. Now he plans to stay.
“I started to experience the quality of life that exists here,” he told me. “Whether it’s education or healthcare, but as I start to enter the next chapter of life, in my 30s, these things start to ring more true,” he said. Now, with a wife, a career and, finally, French citizenship, he has no doubt that he made the right choice.
Schmanski recalls two pocket questions that were deeply persuasive. “I racked my brains at midnight when I stood up under a closet door that I didn’t know was open above me, saw blood, passed out, woke up and thought, “I should probably go to the hospital. But like a good American I said, ‘No, I don’t want to go to the hospital. I don’t want the $20,000 bill.”
“But my girlfriend, now my wife, said, ‘go to the hospital, it’s covered.’ And I left with 15 euros [$16] account. Wow, 15 euros. To sew my head back on. So I said, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe there’s something in the system here.’”
Then there was graduate school. “I went to business school, a really good master’s program in 15 months, in and out for the equivalent of $15,000,” Schmanski said.
The most popular destinations right now for Americans looking for a way out appear to be Spain, Portugal and Greece, according to Casaburi of Global Citizens Solutions. She added that Italy had been a popular choice for some time, but suggested that the arrival of far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni made some Americans question whether they were risking going from the frying pan to the fire.
As for my wife and me, a permanent move to France wouldn’t be a huge leap – just, as would be the case for many others, it would be an extension of the time we spend there today.
But does the next generation of Americans also see their future elsewhere? “In the past, the conversations we’ve had with Americans have been, ‘Do I need to retire in Europe?’ but now the group of people has a very different profile – younger families,” said Casaburi.
“So at some point there is a cost to the country when you lose income tax payers but also talented young professionals,” she added.
As Casaburi, herself a Brazilian now living in London, concluded: “Americans have suddenly found themselves in a position where they feel like they don’t know who their neighbors or their family are.”
“I don’t think it really matters which side of the political spectrum you are on. I think everyone is reevaluating a little bit of everything,” she said.
As for us, much would depend on the nature of Trump’s promise to embrace the role of dictator for a day ends up being. As Pamela says, “it depends on how safe we feel in the kind of country he promises – one that is no longer a democracy.”
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