“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” — Eagles, Hotel California (1976)
At the U.S. consulate in London, the wait to renounce American citizenship is now more than fourteen months. About 325,000 Americans live in Britain—more than in any other European country—and a growing number of them have decided they want to stay. Just no longer as Americans.
The same thing is happening everywhere. Wait times in Canada are reportedly around two years—longer than London’s—with Toronto and Vancouver among the worst. Sydney is months behind, Edinburgh is backed up too, and many European cities run six-month waiting lists.
Part of the reason for the surge is a fee cut. After a years-long legal challenge, the State Department issued a final rule in March 2026 cutting the cost of renunciation from $2,350 to $450—a return to the pre-2015 level—effective April 13. The challenge came from groups representing Americans abroad, most prominently L’Association des Américains Accidentels (AAA), who argued that the $2,350 fee was financially ruinous for people who never chose U.S. citizenship in the first place. When the price fell, the queue surged.
But the fee is just a trigger, not the root cause. The people in that line mostly left years ago—for a job, a marriage, a school, a cheaper life. Moving abroad is the separation. Renunciation is the divorce. And while divorce can be filed for sentimental reasons, it is usually about money.
The United States taxes its citizens on their worldwide income no matter where they live—only one other country, Eritrea, does the same. Every year, an American abroad files a U.S. tax return and reports foreign bank accounts under FATCA, a cumbersome law that has led many foreign banks to refuse American customers rather than take on the paperwork. For some, renunciation is the only switch that turns the requirement off.
Many of my friends and colleagues live abroad. One of them couldn’t make New Mexico work on her $1,000 monthly Social Security check, even with the English lessons she teaches online. In Nicaragua, the check and the lessons cover everything. Another had real wealth and wanted a more tax-friendly home. Between property taxes, income taxes, and the cost of everything rising, the arithmetic of staying has gotten worse.
Underneath all of it sits one broken promise: work hard, play by the rules, and you can afford a house, a doctor, and a retirement. That promise now holds only for the lucky—the ones who bought before prices ran, or inherited, or bet on something that happened to go up. Everyone else did everything right and watched the rules stop working.
None of that explains a destination like Britain—or Europe generally. If renunciation were about finding a better country, the continent would be a strange choice. Britain’s real wages are no higher than they were in 2008. Germany’s economy has barely grown since 2019. Youth unemployment runs above 20% in Italy and Spain. This is not a continent on the make.
Which means the comparison isn’t between America and a rising Europe. It’s between a dollar check and a cheaper corner of a declining one. The American who moves to Porto is not trading an expensive decline for a thriving country. He is trading an expensive decline for a cheaper one.
The Check
People move abroad for all kinds of reasons. But if they aren’t working in the host country or earning its currency, they are there because an American income pays for it—a pension, a salary, a wage.
Nobody has a clean count. Estimates of Americans abroad run anywhere from 4 million to 9 million, but nobody separates the ones earning local wages from the ones living on dollars. My guess is that the second group has grown a lot. The digital nomad boom put millions of Americans to work from laptops in places with better weather and lower rent, and their clients pay in dollars. Meanwhile the baby boomers started retiring, and a good share of them looked at the cost of a house and a doctor at home and went somewhere the Social Security check stretches. Neither group is working in the local economy.
They are going in numbers nobody expected. In 2025, for the first time in at least half a century, the United States experienced negative net migration—meaning more people left the country than arrived. While that shift was driven largely by falling immigration and stricter enforcement, it coincides with growing restlessness at home. Brookings estimates the total net outflow at between 10,000 and 295,000, while Gallup finds that one in five Americans would like to leave for good—nearly double the share in 2008.
They are teachers and retirees and remote workers and young families. They are moving to Portugal, where the American population has multiplied more than fivefold since the pandemic—from roughly 4,800 in 2020 to 26,000 in 2025. To Ireland, which took in ten thousand Americans last year, double the year before. To Germany, where more Americans arrived than Germans left for America.
So they take their check somewhere cheaper. A retired teacher from Michigan on Social Security is poor in Ann Arbor and comfortable in Porto. Same check. Different country. On paper, it is the simplest trade in the world.
So where does the discount come from?
The Rent
And this is where the blind spot appears. While the people who leave can renounce a country, they cannot renounce the system that pays for the renouncing. The retiree with the check is the clearest case. But even the renouncer who earns in pounds holds savings, a pension, a mortgage, a retirement priced in the same system. They cannot renounce the currency they are using to go.
The dollar is not strong because America makes things the world can’t live without. It is strong because the world agreed, decades ago, to park its money in dollars—first because the dollar was backed by gold, and later because oil was priced in it. That agreement has outlived most of its reasons.
Demand for dollars is a habit, and that habit keeps the dollar expensive. Which means anyone whose income arrives in dollars—a pension, a Social Security check, a 401(k), a Florida rental—gets a quiet subsidy in many places abroad. The American abroad doesn’t have to do anything clever to win, just as the nation that held the reserve currency didn’t. He simply holds a claim on dollars, and the world’s hunger for dollars makes each one buy more in Portugal than it would in Michigan.
There is a word for the profit that comes from issuing money other people need to hold: seigniorage. It usually means what a government skims from minting coins. Here it means something bigger. The American abroad is collecting a small slice of the rent that the dollar charges the entire world for using its currency. He did not build that system. He is living off it.
And he has plenty of company. A growing share of income no longer comes from making things. It comes from holding a position in a chain of claims. The 401(k) is a claim on future earnings, discounted in dollars, held by someone who never touches the factory. The landlord in Florida is collecting rent from a tenant whose wages are paid in dollars. The pension is a claim on a fund that is a claim on a market that is priced in the same currency.
It’s called rent. It covers a patent, a parking space, a reserve currency. What has changed is how much of the economy now runs on it, and how long the chain has grown. A wage is a claim on what you make. A dividend is a claim on what someone else makes. A Social Security check is a claim on the government’s power to tax. Stack enough claims and the distance between the check and the thing it ultimately draws on grows long enough that no one can see the end of it.
That distance is where the risk lives, and almost no one is looking at it.
The teacher from Michigan has moved somewhere his check buys a life, but the check is a claim on a system that is repricing. If the dollar falls against the euro, Porto gets expensive. If it falls against the baht, Chiang Mai does. He has not escaped the machine. He has moved to the cheapest corner of the machine’s output and is living on it.
The digital nomad stands on the same perch. His clients pay in dollars. His rent is set by the flow of dollars. If the dollar weakens, the laptop closes.
This is the sense in which you can check out any time you like, but you can never really leave. The dollar fell about ten percent last year. Against the euro it did worse. A retiree in Porto on a fixed check noticed before the economists did.
And here is the irony. When enough Americans arrive with dollars to spend, prices rise. Lisbon’s rents have climbed for a decade. Local wages have not. The retiree who came because it was affordable is part of why it stops being affordable. He did not mean to, but he is part of the same flow he left home to escape. The dollar goes far—until enough people bring their dollars.
The people who stay watch their neighborhood reorganize around people who don’t live there. The waiter, the cleaner, the property manager—their work exists because the money arrives from outside. But the wage is set locally, and the rent is set by the flow. The local who cannot afford to leave is hired to serve the people who can.
The same thing happens at home, in reverse. Immigrants are nearly a fifth of the U.S. workforce, and when their numbers fell in 2025, native-born employment didn’t rise to meet it. The work didn’t transfer to the people who stayed. It transferred to whoever would do it for the wage the flow sets.
The exit is real, and the arithmetic is real. But the arithmetic depends on the very system the exit was supposed to escape. The American who left because the promise broke is living off the proceeds of the system that broke it—and extending that system to the places he lands. The queue in London is not a line out of America. It is a line deeper into it.
The Exit
So what does a person actually do?
The first answer is the hardest: use your dollars now to buy a life that does not need them. Land. A well. A solar array. Tools. Skills. Neighbors you can count on. The things that produce food, water, heat, and company without a monthly check from a system that might not keep paying. It is the only exit that truly severs the claim, and most people cannot take it—it costs capital they do not have, and the life it buys is smaller and harder than the one the dollar bought.
The second answer is for everyone who cannot do that yet. Hold something that isn’t a promise.
Most financial wealth is a claim on something else. A bond is a promise from a borrower. A stock is a claim on future profits. A pension is a claim on a fund or a government’s future capacity to pay. Even land ownership depends on a legal system that defines and enforces property rights—which is why it can be taxed, seized, or rezoned out from under you.
Gold is nobody’s promise. It cannot default, be printed, frozen, or inflated away. Carry it across a border and whoever meets you on the other side knows what it is. That is why it has settled accounts between strangers for three thousand years—and why it outlasts the regimes around it, because it was never issued by one.
None of this is a prediction, and none of it is advice. If the dollar holds, gold drags on returns and the well is a sunk cost. If it doesn’t, both are the things that still buy bread.
Neither move is risk-free. The well can run dry. The neighbors can turn out to be strangers. Gold pays no interest, can be taxed or confiscated, and looks foolish if the crisis never comes. The point is that both are attempts to hold something real instead of a promise—and that is the only kind of exit that actually gets you out.
There is a third risk, and it attaches to both moves. The land and the well are only yours if the country lets you keep them. Residency is not a right. It is a permission, renewed on terms someone else sets—and those terms move.
Portugal is the case study. The Golden Visa was for years the easiest door in Europe: buy property, get residency, and after five years, citizenship. Then in October 2023 the government removed real estate from the program, cutting off roughly 90% of where the investment had gone.
Then it went further. A new nationality law doubled the wait from five years to ten, with no broad transition for people already in the pipeline. More than 500 Golden Visa holders, predominantly American, are preparing a collective lawsuit. One of their lawyers called it “a significant change to the rules in the middle of the game.” The Constitutional Court was asked whether pending applicants deserved a transition period. It ruled the constitution did not require one.
The pattern is not confined to Portugal. Greece raised its threshold to €800,000 in the neighborhoods people actually want. Spain abolished its program outright in April 2025. Ireland closed its with a single day’s notice. Malaysia more than tripled its deposit requirement. The point isn’t that these programs fail. It’s that they are written for the country’s convenience, not yours, and can be rewritten when the politics change.
And the politics does change. When housing gets expensive, the newcomer is the easiest person to blame.
In Ponta do Sol, rents rose 30% in a single year. In Lisbon, the walls say “Tourists go home” and “Lisbon is not for sale.” An American resident was told to her face: “You’re why my mother had to leave her apartment.” She wasn’t wrong.
That is the position the expat occupies—useful while he is spending, resented when he is the reason the rent went up, and dependent on a permit when the mood turns.
If you have the capital, buy independence. If you don’t, buy insurance. Those are the two that don’t ask you to trust the system, and neither one is a clean escape.
Back to London. The line outside the consulate moves slowly, one folder at a time.
You can renounce a citizenship. You cannot renounce the currency.
The check still comes from the federal government. The claim still sits on the Treasury. The dollar still goes further in Porto than in Ann Arbor. The people in that queue have left the country. They have not left the system that pays for the leaving.
The people at the back of the line will wait fourteen months to renounce a country that will still tax them, still pay them, still set the terms of their standard of living. They are not leaving. They are filing paperwork.
That is the part nobody tells them in the waiting room. The passport is the easy thing to give up. The claim is the thing that follows you.
Thank you for reading. If this essay resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. And if you would like to support more work like this, you can support me on Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, or Substack.
References
Anderson, Stuart. Immigrants and the U.S. Labor Force in 2025. Policy Brief. Arlington, VA: National Foundation for American Policy, September 2025. nfap.com.
Brookings Institution. “U.S. Net Migration Estimates, 2025.” Reported in The Washington Post, January 13, 2026, and Newsmax, January 13, 2026.
Donn, Natasha. “More than 500 Golden Visa Residents Planning to Sue the Portuguese State.” The Portugal Resident, May 8, 2026. portugalresident.com.
Gallup. “One in Five Americans Would Like to Leave the U.S.” November 2025. Reported in The Independent, November 14, 2025, and National Post, November 19, 2025.
Morning Brew. “Americans Are Ditching America in Droves.” Morning Brew, February 27, 2026.
O’Sullivan, Feargus. “Europe’s Golden Visas Are Dying Out as Housing Costs Soar.” Bloomberg CityLab, April 10, 2024. bloomberg.com.
Rogers, Reece. “Welcome to Digital Nomadland.” WIRED, December 16, 2022. wired.com.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Labor Force Characteristics of Foreign-Born Workers — 2025.” News release USDL-26-0812, May 19, 2026. bls.gov.
U.S. Department of State. “Schedule of Fees for Consular Services: Administrative Processing of Formal Renunciation of U.S. Citizenship.” Final rule, 22 CFR Part 22. Federal Register, March 13, 2026.
Williams, Zoe. “‘I Don’t Want to Be Part of a Dictatorship’: The Americans Queueing Up to Renounce Their Citizenship.” The Guardian, April 28, 2026.
World Gold Council. Gold Demand Trends: Full Year 2025. January 29, 2026.
